Kissinger’s Shadow (33 page)

Authors: Greg Grandin

BOOK: Kissinger’s Shadow

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9: CAUSE AND EFFECT

10: ONWARD TO THE GULF

âââ
8
.ââ
New York Times
columnist Tom Wicker on the Kissinger Commission: “President Reagan's decision to set up a âbipartisan' national commission to underpin his unpopular Central American policy is bad news for more reasons than the rebirth of Henry Kissinger.â¦ The plan extends the already worrisome practice of turning over hard-fought political issues to supposedly blue-ribbon, non-governmental commissions. When such a panel delivers what appears to be an arbitrator's Solomonic decision in substitute for the political judgments of Congress and the president, the result is dangerous to oppose and even difficult to modify.” Considering Kissinger's actions in Chile, Wicker said, “a less appropriate person to act as arbiter of policy anywhere in Latin America could not be found this side of General Pinochet” (“Hiding behind Henry,”
New York Times
, July 19, 1983). As late as 1989, Vice President Dan Quayle was invoking the Kissinger Commission to justify an ongoing hard line: “I believe it was best spelled out in the Kissinger Report, which was produced in the early 1980s by former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger.”

21
.ââLikewise, the moderation of George W. Bush's secretary of state, Colin Powell, has often been contrasted favorably with the rashness of the neocons in the post-9/11 years. As the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in 1989, however, Powell was a strong supporter of the invasion. It was Powell who pushed for a more exalted name to brand the war with, one that undermined the very idea of those “limits” he was theoretically trying to establish. Following Pentagon practice, the operational plan to capture Noriega was to go by the meaningless name of “Blue Spoon.” That, Powell wrote in
My American Journey
(1995), was “hardly a rousing call to arms.â¦ [So] we kicked around a number of ideas and finally settled onÂ â¦ Just Cause. Along with the inspirational ring, I liked something else about it. Even our severest critics would have to utter âJust Cause' while denouncing us.” Yet since the pursuit of justice is infinite, it's hard to see what your exit strategy is once you claim it as your “cause” (recall that George W. Bush's original name for his Global War on Terror was to be Operation Infinite Justice).

24
.ââThe contradiction in denying sovereignty to other nations while claiming it for one's own is obvious. But the contradiction can be managed as long as the double standard is justified, as Kissinger prefers, by the interests of state, by the need to establish international legitimacy and stability (and that justification, as we have seen, need not be considered amoral: a greater good can be achieved when great powers are allowed to create an orderly, stable, and peaceful interstate system). Problems emerge once denial of sovereignty is sanctioned by “democracy” and “human rights.” The idea that there exists a “universal jurisdiction” of justice that trumps national sovereignty, as Einaudi lectured Latin Americans, opens up a Pandora's box, a threat that Kissinger immediately recognized: Kissinger supported the invasion of Panama to overthrow Noriega but objected to the “legality of the present legal proceedings” against Noriega in the United States. “I have some question whether you can try a foreign leader under American law for acts he didn't commit on American soil.” It was an interesting question, said Kissinger, and it was indeed. Captured by the US military, Noriega was illegally transferred to the United States (Washington had no extradition treaty with Panama to justify the removal of Noriega), put on trial in Miami in April 1992 in the US District Court for the Southern District of Florida, and convicted in September for drug trafficking, racketeering, and money launderingâcrimes that he committed prior to Panama's being “at war” with the United States. In 1998, the principle of “universal jurisdiction” advanced again when the British detained Augusto Pinochet in response to a Spanish extradition request, for crimes committed against Spanish citizens in Chile. This action moved Kissinger to write an essay in
Foreign Affairs
(July/August 2001) defending his old ally, titled “The Pitfalls of Universal Jurisdiction.” “The ideological supporters of universal jurisdiction,” Kissinger wrote, want to “criminalize certain types of military and political actions and thereby bring about a more humane conduct of international relations.” It was a “dangerous precedent,” he wrote, referring to efforts to extradite former leaders. The essay reads like a brief for his own defense, for just two months after it was published, on September 10, 2001, the children of Chilean general RenÃ© Schneider filed a suit in federal court in Washington charging Kissinger and cohorts with “summary execution” of their father. Judge Rosemary Collyer, a former Reagan administration official appointed to the bench by George W. Bush, dismissed the suit on technical and jurisdictional grounds, including upholding the defense's argument that since Kissinger was acting as the national security adviser of the United States, the proper defendant of the suit would be the United States government, and the United States, based on the doctrine of sovereign immunity, is exempt from such suits. Since then, however, other countries have opened legal investigations of Kissinger's activities. Returning to the case of Noriega, Kissinger's protÃ©gÃ© Scowcroft was also opposed to the idea of putting the Panamanian leader on trial, for much the same reason as Kissinger was: “In the late Reagan administration, Noriega was indicted, which I thought was a strange way to behave. I thought that the United States indicting foreign officials, over whom we had no jurisdiction, was really an aberration. So I didn't take that very seriously. President Bush did. He kept mentioning the indictment of Noriega, and I kept saying, âYou can't do that. You can't do that. You have no jurisdiction. It's a foreign official. They're unindictable anyway.'” Noriega is still in prison, now in Panama, having completed his term in the United States and then, on different charges, in France. For Scowcroft, see his interview cited earlier. For Kissinger's opinion of Noriega's transfer to the United States, see “Soviets Intervened on Autonomy Issue, Kissinger Suggests,”
The Globe and Mail
, January 26, 1990.

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