seems to have died this evening, if one believes the times. Most of you are too young to remember him while he held office. there will be many, many hot takes, and this is not one, but in the context of the current crisis, some of you might find this bit of history relevant and interesting. the whole article was posted elsewhere in the Yom Kippur thread, but worth excerpting here: IV. Nixon, Kissinger, and Israel <snip> The Israeli archives contain a remarkable document from 1971 recording a meeting between Kissinger and Yigal Alon, the former commander of the Palmach, the elite fighting force of Israel’s pre-state military. Alon, at the time Meir’s deputy prime minister, was in Washington to discuss an Egyptian diplomatic initiative that, Kissinger feared, the State Department would use to impose unilateral concessions on the Israelis. The Israeli record of the conversation captures a side of Kissinger that rarely appears in American documents: Kissinger, the friend of Israel, coaching the Israelis on how to protect themselves from the American bureaucrats who seek to roll Israel back from the territories occupied in 1967—exactly as Eisenhower had rolled them back in 1957. “The situation you confront today is that everybody in the U.S. government wants to impose a settlement on you at least along the Rogers lines. Get that into your heads,” Kissinger explained. Alon asked Kissinger whether Israel, in the eyes of the State Department, is a “liability.” “Yes!” Kissinger answered emphatically. “Most of the Arabists,” he continued, “are colonialists who remember the Arabs in their pre-war image and long for those days again. And the State Department is not the worst of the lot! You have today a totally united government against you. You have never been in such a position here before.” Kissinger emphasized that Nixon was the only person in the American system who could counterbalance the State Department. “You Israelis don’t seem to understand that you have only one single hope—the president.” The State Department’s approach to peacemaking, informed by its particular ambitions and worldview, would leave Israel weakened. Thus, Kissinger advised, the Jewish state must be stiff-necked with the State Department, so that eventually the president would have to intervene personally. When making concessions, Israel should deliver them only to the president himself, to ensure that Nixon felt personally invested. To engage Nixon directly, Kissinger explained, the Israelis had to understand the man. “The president,” Kissinger said, “is very good on big strategic issues. He has no particular love for Jews. He does not give a damn for Israel in the abstract. It interests him only within the strategic context of the Middle East. He told me so. He has a good conception of the strategic significance of the Middle East.” <snip> In July 1972, Sadat expelled the Soviet military personnel from Egypt. Through Hafiz Isma’il, his national-security advisor, he opened a direct channel to Kissinger. In February 1973, Isma’il informed Kissinger that Egypt would be willing to make peace with Israel but normalization of relations would have to await a full Israeli withdrawal from all territories occupied in 1967. The Israelis responded with uncertainty to the offer. Nixon and Kissinger, for their part, favored postponing a major diplomatic initiative, convinced that the balance of power strongly favored Israel against Egypt and Syria. Kissinger communicated to Sadat his intention to launch a peace initiative after the Israeli elections, scheduled for October 30. When, on Yom Kippur morning 1973, Kissinger was awakened in his hotel and received the commitment from Golda Meir that Israel would not launch a preemptive strike, he immediately called the Soviet ambassador Anatoli Dobrynin to inform him that the Israelis wanted the Soviets to know that they had no intention to attack—but also that the United States was “warning against a precipitous move.” At 6:55 am, fifteen minutes after placing the call to Dobrynin, Kissinger phoned Mordechai Shalev, a senior Israeli diplomat in Washington, and said, “We would like to urge you not to take any preemptive action because the situation will get very serious if you move.” At 7:00 am he called the Egyptian foreign minister and informed him, “I have just called [Mordechai Shalev] and I have told him that if Israel attacks first, we would take a very serious view of the situation and have told him on behalf of the United States that Israel must not attack, no matter what they think the provocation is.” <snip> But giving Egypt and Syria a major advantage over Israel was never Kissinger’s goal. In common with the entire Israeli leadership, including Golda Meir and Moshe Dayan, to say nothing of the CIA, he had no inkling of the power of the blow that Sadat had prepared for Israel. Like everyone else on the morning of Yom Kippur, he assumed that the war would last only a few days, and that Israel would win handily. Kissinger’s blunder stemmed from a temporary misunderstanding of the military balance, but in terms of his strategic intentions, he was nothing if not consistent. From 1970 until leaving office, he pursued the same strategy that he and Nixon had formulated at the end of the War of Attrition in 1970, namely, to use Israel as a lever to pry Egypt away from the Soviet Union. When he called the Soviet ambassador and the Egyptian foreign minister on October 6, 1973, he sought the same outcome he had pursued in 1971, when he had tutored Alon on how to dance around the State Department: a balance of power that favored Israel. But the key word is “balance.” A balance of power allowed the United States—in the person of Kissinger—to step in and mediate between Cairo and Jerusalem, with an eye to drawing Sadat out of the Soviet sphere and into the American. What Kissinger feared most on the morning of Yom Kippur was an Israeli blow-out, another lopsided victory in which Israel would take even more territory from Egypt and Syria and potentially shake the regimes. In such a situation, domestic considerations would prevent Sadat from making concessions to Israel. Egypt would instead be forced back into the arms of the Soviet Union, as it had been after the Six-Day War, to prepare for another round of fighting. By securing Meir’s restraint and then informing the Soviets and the Egyptians about it, Kissinger was pursuing two immediate goals. First, he wanted to prevent a direct Soviet escalation of the kind that he had already seen in the War of Attrition—that is, a reintroduction of Soviet combat troops. Such an escalation would put pressure on Nixon to match Brezhnev’s moves, and the Egyptian-Israeli conflict would escalate into a superpower confrontation. Second, he wanted to preserve an open line to the Egyptians so that, after the conflict ended, he could jumpstart the diplomacy that he had delayed until after the Israeli elections, hoping Israeli success on the battlefield would give him greater leverage. During the first week of the war, as Kissinger absorbed the reality of Israeli vulnerability, he received impassioned pleas from Golda Meir for planes, tanks, and ammunition. Nixon approved the resupply, but the initial shipments were small, and their delivery was unreliable. Meir complained about the delays, but the president was inaccessible, distracted by the resignation of Vice-President Spiro Agnew on October 10, and the Watergate scandal, which was building toward its October 20 climax, when Nixon ordered the dismissal of Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox and made impeachment all but inevitable. Kissinger either chose not to sort out the problems or failed in his efforts. Finally, on October 14th, Nixon ordered a major airlift, one of the biggest in history, putting an end to all obstacles. https://mosaicmagazine.com/essay/is...hidden-calculation-behind-the-yom-kippur-war/
I thought he looked old back in the '70's. The guy was parodied by Kubrick in Dr. Strangelove. Crazy. I don't know if Henry will Rest in Peace, but he's earned some rest after a century on this planet.
Henry Kissinger, War Criminal Beloved by America’s Ruling Class, Finally Dies Henry Kissinger died on Wednesday at his home in Connecticut, his consulting firm said in a statement. The notorious war criminal was 100. Measuring purely by confirmed kills, the worst mass murderer ever executed by the United States was the white supremacist terrorist Timothy McVeigh. On April 19, 1995, McVeigh detonated a massive bomb at the Murrah federal building in Oklahoma City, killing 168 people, including 19 children. The government killed McVeigh by lethal injection in June 2001. Whatever hesitation a state execution provokes, even over a man such as McVeigh — necessary questions about the legitimacy of killing even an unrepentant soldier of white supremacy — his death provided a measure of closure to the mother of one of his victims. “It’s a period at the end of a sentence,” said Kathleen Treanor, whose 4-year old McVeigh killed. McVeigh, who in his own psychotic way thought he was saving America, never remotely killed on the scale of Kissinger, the most revered American grand strategist of the second half of the 20th century. The Yale University historian Greg Grandin, author of the biography Kissinger’s Shadow, estimates that Kissinger’s actions from 1969 through 1976, a period of eight brief years when Kissinger made Richard Nixon’s and then Gerald Ford’s foreign policy as national security adviser and secretary of state, meant the end of between three and four million people. That includes “crimes of commission,” he explained, as in Cambodia and Chile, and omission, like greenlighting Indonesia’s bloodshed in East Timor; Pakistan’s bloodshed in Bangladesh; and the inauguration of an American tradition of using and then abandoning the Kurds. “The Cubans say there is no evil that lasts a hundred years, and Kissinger is making a run to prove them wrong,” Grandin told Rolling Stone not long before Kissinger died. “There is no doubt he’ll be hailed as a geopolitical grand strategist, even though he bungled most crises, leading to escalation. He’ll get credit for opening China, but that was De Gaulle’s original idea and initiative. He’ll be praised for detente, and that was a success, but he undermined his own legacy by aligning with the neocons. And of course, he’ll get off scot free from Watergate, even though his obsession with Daniel Ellsberg really drove the crime.” Rest: https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/henry-kissinger-war-criminal-dead-1234804748/
Did a little jump and heel click after hearing the news. Only disappointing part was him dying in peace surrounded by family at 100. I'm sure many attempts at urinating at his headstone will occur. Many evil acts like prolonging the Vietnam war for selfish political reasons. Thousands of dead Americans and civilians overseas because of this **** stain narcissist who had to butt in all the time.
“How does it feel to be a war criminal, Henry?” Peter Jennings once asked him at a dinner party thrown by Barbara Walters.
Grandin is confusing Nixon w Kissinger kissinger was Nison's secretary of states; on US soils Nixon had other underlings to do his dirty work, such as Mitchell/Erlichmann, Halderman, the Watergate plumbers, etc.
What should be said about a man who indiscriminately ordered the death of untold thousands of people and escaped any scrutiny because he was good at socializing? Sometimes it's ok to call bad people "bad" and not lionize them for being well-spoken and living for 100 years.
