Kissinger’s Shadow (41 page)

Authors: Greg Grandin

BOOK: Kissinger’s Shadow

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On April 14, 1986, the Reagan administration launched an air strike on Libya, in response to Libya's involvement in the April 5 bombing of a Berlin nightclub, which killed two US soldiers and one Turkish civilian. Secretary of State George Shultz said the US strike was “measured” and “proportionate” to Libya's crime (US planes hit a number of residential buildings, killing an estimated fifteen civilians. Muammar Gaddafi's daughter was also reportedly killed). To justify the reprisal, Shultz cited article 51 of the United Nations charter, which grants nations the right to “self-defense.” A nation, Shultz said, “attacked by terrorists is permitted to use force to prevent or preempt future attacks.” It was a generous interpretation of the doctrine of self-defense (the United States wasn't attacked by Libya; rather, two of its soldiers were killed in Germany) which most legal scholars at the time disagreed with. Jimmy Carter's former White House counsel, Lloyd Cutler, tried to capture the administration's logic: “As a superpower with global responsibilities, if our forces are attacked in another country, you can construe it as an attack on our territory.” The day after the US strike, Kissinger appeared on ABC's
Good Morning America
to voice his “total support” of the raid. Attacking Libya, he said, was “correct” and “necessary.” Asked if he was worried about a backlashâincreased radicalization, reprisals, or a boost to Gaddafi's statureâhe answered: “The question is whose endurance is greater. I believe ours is.” The bombing would, Kissinger said, “reduce the incidents of terrorism.” Kissinger was also asked what he thought of Reagan's rhetoric. The president had called Gaddafi a “mad dog.” “President Reagan has,” Kissinger said, “his own exuberant way of communicating with the American public.” “Sixty percent of the public agrees with him,” Kissinger noted (
Good Morning America
, April 15, 1986, video available at Vanderbilt University Television News Archive;
Washington Post
, April 15, 1986). A case can be made that Shultz's invocation of article 51 was both a vindication of the logic of Kissinger's secret bombing of Cambodiaâoften justified by Kissinger as self-defenseâand a preview of the Authorization to Use Military Force, passed overwhelmingly by the House and Senate on September 14, 2001, which sanctioned not just the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq but the open-ended Global War on Terrorism. There is, today, no part of the earth that cannot be considered “our territory.”

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Here's one account of Kissinger's diverse activities in the late 1980s: “He makes about 20 speeches a year and charges $20,000 for each. Shearson Lehman pays him over $500,000 a year for four luncheon speeches and ad hoc advice. His own company, Kissinger Associatesâhigh-income, low-profile, containing only a handful of specialistsâbrings in an estimated $5 million in revenues from consulting. Kissinger's former associates, for whom he is mentor, riddle the Bush administration. The deputy Secretary of State, Mr Lawrence Eagleburger, took the position fresh from working for Kissinger Associates. Eagleburger, the Administration's East-West guru, declared an income of $916,989 last year, solely from his work with Kissinger. General Brent Scowcroft, Bush's National Security Adviser, was a deputy to Kissinger in the Nixon administration, a loyal follower and a founder of Kissinger Associates” (“Resurrected and Visible,”
Australian Financial Review
, October 13, 1989).

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US forces were in and out (with their prisoner Noriega) relatively fast, making Operation Just Cause one of the most successful military actions in US history. At least in tactical terms. There were casualties. More than twenty US soldiers were killed and three to five hundred Panamanian combatants died as well. Disagreement exists over how many civilians perished. In the “low hundreds,” the Pentagon's Southern Command said. But others charged that US officials didn't bother to count the dead in El Chorrillo, a poor Panama City
barrio
that US planes indiscriminately bombed because it was thought to be a bastion of support for Noriega. Grassroots human rights organizations claimed thousands of civilians were killed and tens of thousands displaced. As Human Rights Watch wrote, even conservative estimates of civilian fatalities suggested “that the rule of proportionality and the duty to minimize harm to civiliansÂ â¦ were not faithfully observed by the invading U.S. forces.” That may have been putting it mildly when it came to the indiscriminate bombing of a civilian population. Civilians were given no notice. The Cobra and Apache helicopters that came over the ridge didn't announce their pending arrival by blasting Wagner's “Ride of the Valkyries.” The University of Panama's seismograph marked 442 major explosions in the first twelve hours of the invasion, about one major bomb blast every two minutes. Fires engulfed the mostly wooden homes, destroying about four thousand buildings. Some residents began to call El Chorrillo “Guernica” or “little Hiroshima.” Shortly after hostilities ended, bulldozers excavated mass graves and shoveled in the bodies. “Buried like dogs,” said the mother of one of the civilian dead.

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In an essay written before Iraq's invasion (but published subsequently in the
National Interest
), Kirkpatrick even suggested that the United States, with the Cold War over, might “again become a normal nationâand take care of pressing problems of education, family, industry and technology.” Peter Beinart, in
The Icarus Syndrome: A History of American Hubris
, details the attacks of a younger, more bellicose group of neoconservatives led by figures such as Charles Krauthammer and Paul Wolfowitz (those who went on to lead the United States into Iraq in 2003) on Kirkpatrick-style restraint. Kissinger's call for an aggressive response in the first Gulf War helped tip the intellectual argument in favor of these younger “Wilsonians.” And as the number of US troops increased in Saudi Arabia, even Kirkpatrick began to take a tough line.

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Kissinger expressed contempt for these interventions for a number of reasons: they were ad hoc, they were justified in the name of “humanitarianism,” and they lacked focus, in terms of both immediate objectives and long-term vision. In 1992, he thought the deployment of troops to Somalia, in the last months of the George H. W. Bush's term, a mistake (“We must not seem to be claiming for ourselves a doctrine of universal unilateral intervention,” he wrote [“Somalia: Reservations,”
Washington Post,
December 13, 1992]). But once the Black Hawk Down incident occurred early in the Clinton administration, he called for swift retaliation. In 1994, he criticized Clinton for sending soldiers to Haiti to restore its elected President Jean-Bertrand Aristide: “I do not favor a military invasion because I can't describe the threat Haiti presents to the United States” (“Kissinger Speaks at Nixon Library,”
Los Angeles Times,
July 21, 1994). And the Bosnia conflict seemed to confuse him. The breakup of Yugoslavia started under George H. W. Bush, and Kissinger's ally Lawrence Eagleburger, Bush's deputy secretary of state, came under intense criticism for bungling Washington's response to the crisis. When he was a member of Kissinger Associates, Eagleburger had deep business ties to the Serbs, and some suggested a conflict of interest made him too soft on Slobodan Milosevic (“Eagleburger Anguishes over Yugoslav Upheaval,”
New York Times,
June 19, 1992). In 1995, Kissinger said he was opposed to war, arguing that Serbs were not aggressors and that one solution might be to enclose Muslims into their own state (see his appearance on the
Charlie Rose
show, September 14, 1995). Then, once war started, he said it had to be won. He was opposed to the intervention in Kosovo, parting ways with some prominent neoconservatives who were strong for that war. But once fighting started, he agreed with William Kristol that “the war must be won,” as John Podhoretz writes, that “victory means that Milosevic is forced to bend to NATO's willâor is driven from power,” that Clinton's “conduct of the war has been shameful” and is “weakening NATO's resolve dangerously, and that if the president does not stiffen his resolve and NATO's collective spine in the next month, the alliance's commitment will begin to fall apart” (“This War's Strange Bedfellows,”
New York Post,
May 26, 1999). Even as he advanced these criticisms of Clinton, and even as he grew closer to neoconservatives over Iraq, Kissinger still occasionally had ideological disputes with Reaganite “Wilsonians,” especially over his defense of China. His last serious pre-9/11 skirmish with neoconservatives took place with the 1999 publication of the third volume of his memoir,
Years of Renewal.
In that book, Kissinger tried to credit dÃ©tente for bringing about the end of the Cold War. Robert Kagan offered an extremely negative review of the book in
The New Republic
(“The Revolutionist: How Henry Kissinger Won the Cold War, or So He Thinks,” June 21, 1999). Kagan was particularly upset over Kissinger's attempt to take credit for the 1975 Helsinki human rights accords (which neoconservatives view as a repudiation of amoral realpolitik).

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In July 2003, Assistant Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, an architect of the invasion of Iraq, explained to Tim Russert on
Meet the Press
that the unsustainability of “containment” was the major reason for warânot supposed Iraqi links to Al Qaeda or WMDs: “Let me say a couple of things, Tim. People act as though the cost of containing Iraq is trivial. The cost of containing Iraq was enormous, 55 American lives lost, at least, in incidents like the Cole and Kobar Towers, which were part of the containment effort, billions of dollars of American money spent.â¦ And worst of all, if you go back and read Osama bin Laden's notorious fatwa from 1998, where he calls for killing Americans, the two principal grievances were the presence of those forces in Saudi Arabia, and our continuing attacks on Iraq, 12 years of containment was a terrible price for us, and for the Iraqi people it was an unbelievable price, Tim.â¦ And I think one of the things that would have come by waiting [to depose Hussein], frankly, is more instability for the key countries in our coalition, including Arab countries.”

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It's now a ritual among our political class to seek out Kissinger and engage in some form of public banter with him, as Samantha Power, Barack Obama's ambassador to the United Nations, recently did when the two diplomats went to a Yankee game together. Power, the author of a Pulitzer-Prize-winning book,
A Problem from Hell
, that earned her a reputation as a fierce opponent of genocide, jokingly asked Kissinger why he became a Yankee fan. “Was that in keeping with a realist's perspective on the world? Was that where victories were likely?” Power continued, referring to herself: “The human rights advocate, of course, falls in love with the Red Sox, the downtrodden, the people who can't win the World Series.” “Now we are the downtrodden,” replied Kissinger, a man implicated in three of the genocidesâCambodia, Bangladesh, and East Timorâthat Power wrote about.

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Technically, according to Chase Madar, a lawyer and expert in international law, the drone strikes in Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia (as well as all the many battles in the open-ended global counterinsurgency, or COIN) are broadly justified by the Authorization to Use Military Force (AUMF), passed by the House and Senate on September 14, 2001. The drone strikes in Afghanistan have a slightly different legal rationale, found both in the AUMF and Article 51 of the UN Charter, which grants nations the right to “self-defense.” Notably, this was the UN article whose invocation by Secretary of State George Shultz to justify the 1986 bombing of Libya in retaliation for the Berlin nightclub bombing defined the whole world as US territory. More recently, Barack Obama has asked Congress for a new authorization to use military force to fight the Islamic State, a request that would leave in place without alteration the 2001 AUMF.

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