Should Henry Kissinger be prosecuted for war crimes?
The Trials of Henry Kissinger (2002) is a documentary film inspired by Christopher Hitchens' 2001 book The Trial of Henry Kissinger, examining war crimes claimed to have been done by Henry Kissinger, the National Security Advisor and later Secretary of State under Presidents Nixon and Ford.
The documentary was based on a book by the British journalist Christoper Hitchens.
Hitchens veered into the territory of neo-conservatism later in life. But this journey is typical of neo-conservatives. There is a saying among neo-conservatives that "a neo-conservative is a liberal mugged by reality." They have the same activist ideals as when they were young liberals (and socialists and communists), but they embrace the tough methods of conservatives.Having long described himself as a democratic socialist, Marxist and an anti-totalitarian, he broke from the political left after what he called the "tepid reaction" of the Western left to the Satanic Verses controversy, followed by the left's embrace of Bill Clinton and the antiwar movement's opposition to NATO intervention in Bosnia and Herzegovina in the 1990s. His support of the Iraq War separated him further.
The point is that it is neo-conservatives and liberals -- the same people who pushed for the war in Iraq for the sake of radical reconstruction of Iraq into a liberal democracy -- who want to prosecute war criminals.
These liberals and neo-conservatives would persecute in the figure of Henry Kissinger a foreign policy realist who would not support the ambitiously idealistic agenda of the war in Iraq.
"If I had known everything then that I know now, I probably would not have supported it. I thought it would be a quick operation to replace Saddam [Hussein.] I did not think it would lead to — and I would not have favored — a long-term occupation in order to reconstruct a society and to try to repeat the experiences of Germany and Japan in a country that had no comparable institutions. I even then thought that it was beyond the capacity of the United States, or maybe anybody, to turn Iraq into a Western-style democracy. Originally the stated goal was more related to security."
For Kissinger, the prospect of war should be approached not with eagerness and optimism, but with caution. The US has not been successful in war for the past two generations, but Americans seem to have a case of amnesia regarding this.
"The United States has been engaged in five wars since World War II. In only one of them did it reach its stated objective. In another one, it ended in a stalemate, and from three others, we withdrew unilaterally. I'm talking about the first Iraq War, in which we achieved our objective, the Korean War which ended — that was a kind of a stalemate, and Vietnam, the second Iraq War and Afghanistan — from which we withdrew unilaterally."
As an isolated and prosperous democracy, Americans believe that their experience of continuous orderly democratic governance -- or at least, their idealized imagining of it as such -- is normal. That is, Americans believe that there is a deep underlying natural and harmonious order in the universe which is manifest in American society and applies to all societies. Serious disturbances around the world are seen by Americans as anomalies that can be remedied through intervention -- a quick technical fix -- that will restore normality and reshape the world in America's image. But actual human history is nothing like this.
"The United States generally believes that, based on its history, that order is the natural relationship. When order is disturbed, it is for a specific reason. And when you remove that cause of the disturbance, order and peace will reassert themselves. In fact, in almost every part of the world, order is a dynamic process. It can never be equated strictly with the status quo that can then be frozen in place."
Kissinger is very careful to avoid discussing historical events that implicate him in crimes against humanity.
Near the end of our interview, we tried to ask Henry Kissinger to explain happened in Chile on September 11, 1973 — 41 years ago today. That's when the country's military staged a coup to overthrow Chile's democratically-elected, left-wing president, Salvador Allende. We wanted to ask Kissinger to clarify what his role was at the time. He and the Nixon Administration supported the brutal military junta that took power, led by General Augusto Pinochet.
But when we raised the subject today, Kissinger cut us off.
