December 1, 2023
Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – Henry
Kissinger’s death at 100 is an opportunity to consider the ways in which his
lawlessness helped undermine International Humanitarian Law, the laws of war
that responsible leaders attempted to erect to prevent the horrors of WW II
from recurring. In his single-minded calculation of supposed “national”
interest, which he imagined as identical to the interests of the rich, he was
entirely willing to mow down innocent noncombatants in the hundreds of
thousands. There is a direct line from his advocacy of carpet-bombing Southeast
Asian villagers to the Israeli carpet-bombing of Gaza, which resumed early
Friday morning.
Documents released by the Bill
Clinton administration showed that in the first half of 1973, Kissinger and
Nixon had more bomb tonnage dropped on Cambodia than was dropped by the Allies
during all of World War II.
The US war on the Viet Cong led
Washington to attempt to cut off their supply lines, which zigged and zagged
over the borders colonial powers had drawn on Southeast Asia, in and out of
Cambodia. In a fruitless bid to cut off those supplies, the US began bombing
Cambodia in the 1960s, but the intensity of this bombardment increased over
time.
The renewed 1969-1973 bombing
campaign was Kissinger’s idea, “Operation Breakfast.” Sophal Ear writes, “The
diary entry of Richard Nixon’s chief of staff, H. R. Haldeman, reads [on March
17, 1969]: ‘ … Historic day. K[issinger]‘s “Operation Breakfast” finally came
off at 2:00 pm our time. K really excited, as is P[resident].” The following
day, Haldeman wrote: ‘K’s “Operation Breakfast” a great success. He came
beaming in with the report, very productive.'”
What kind of genocidal psychopath
“beams” at beginning the illegal bombing of a country with which the US was not
even at war?
By early 1973 Kissinger’s bright
idea had already so disrupted Cambodian lives that disgruntled peasants there
turned to the Communists, the Khmer Rouge. Kissinger and Nixon ordered even
more bombing as the Communists approached the capital, Phnom Penh.
So Washington upped the ante. Taylor
Owen and Ben Kiernan reported that in February through August of 1973,
“2,756,941 tons’ worth [of bombs were] dropped in 230,516 sorties on 113,716
sites. Just over 10 percent of this bombing was indiscriminate, with 3,580 of
the sites listed as having “unknown” targets and another 8,238 sites having no
target listed at all.” To repeat, in all of World War II the Allies dropped
2,000,000 tons of bombs, including the nuclear warheads at Hiroshima and
Nagasaki. The authors conclude that Cambodia may have been the most bombed
country in world history.
Owen and Kiernan imply that hundreds
of thousands of Cambodians died in this carpet bombing. Cambodia only had a
population of 6.7 million then, so half a million dead, which is a plausible
estimate, would be over 7% of the entire population. That would be like killing
16 million Americans.
While they say that 10% of the
targeted sites were indiscriminate, the fact is that bombing populous villages
from 30,000 feet is always indiscriminate. Most of the hundreds of thousands
dead were certainly innocent noncombatants, a concept Kissinger never
understood; or in a darker reading perhaps he understood it and had contempt
for it. Responding to the repeated nuking of islands in Micronesia in above
ground tests, Kissinger said, “There are only 90,000 of them out there. Who
gives a damn?”
Anthony Bourdain, the great traveler
and food enthusiast, wrote in his 2001 memoir, “Once you’ve been to Cambodia,
you’ll never stop wanting to beat Henry Kissinger to death with your bare
hands. You will never again be able to open a newspaper and read about that
treacherous, prevaricating, murderous scumbag sitting down for a nice chat with
Charlie Rose or attending some black-tie affair for a new glossy magazine
without choking. Witness what Henry did in Cambodia — the fruits of his genius
for statesmanship — and you will never understand why he’s not sitting in the
dock at The Hague next to Milosevic.”
The Netanyahu government’s
carpet-bombing of Gaza is a direct descendant of Kissinger’s Operation
Breakfast.
Yuval Abraham of +972 Mag writes,
“The Israeli army’s expanded authorization for bombing non-military targets,
the loosening of constraints regarding expected civilian casualties, and the
use of an artificial intelligence system to generate more potential targets
than ever before, appear to have contributed to the destructive nature of the
initial stages of Israel’s current war on the Gaza Strip.”
It is estimated that the Israeli Air
Force massacred 15,000 Palestinians in Gaza from the air, very few of them
combatants.
Abraham underlines, “the army
significantly expand[ed] its bombing of targets that are not distinctly
military in nature. These include private residences as well as public
buildings, infrastructure, and high-rise blocks, which sources say the army
defines as “power targets” (‘matarot otzem’).”
Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s
mealy-mouthed assertion that Israeli “precision munitions” can kill Hamas
without killing large numbers of innocent civilians is mere Israeli propaganda.
The precision munitions were set to kill large numbers of noncombatants in a
total war of the Kissingerian sort. As Israeli targeting of the Palestinians
(it is not a war, since the latter have no heavy weapons or air force) resumes,
so will the high body counts, assuming the Netanyahu government permits enough
societal organization to survive to permit the counting.
Kissinger’s butchering of villagers
from the air threw Cambodia into such volatile political turbulence that a
genocide resulted in which 20% of the population was killed, littering the
country with sun-drenched white skeletons.
The Communists defeated him in
Vietnam, where they still rule as preparations are made for Kissinger’s burial.
The Lao People’s Revolutionary Party rules Laos. The Cambodian People’s Party,
with roots in Communism, rules Cambodia, though it has turned to supporting a
mixed economy model.
I don’t predict any sort of victory
or longevity for Hamas itself, but it is clear from this history that you can’t
use air power to destroy radical movements with genuine grassroots.
Palestinians if anything will come out of the carpet-bombing (and the even more
deadly denial of potable water and sufficient food) more radicalized than ever.
They will still be on Israel’s doorstep even if they can be crowded into south
Gaza as the maniacal Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant diabolically plans.
Kissinger rose to positions of power
where he could overrule what he thought of as the soft and namby-pamby laws of
war enacted in 1945 and after. Despite being a refugee from the Holocaust, he
never escaped his formation in a Central European tradition of elite and
profoundly amoral statecraft in the service of an unbridled nationalism and for
the purposes of the super-rich in their white tuxedos.
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