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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