The resignation of Dr. Strangelove
By Leslie Feinberg
When the door to the Sept. 11 commission of inquiry hit
Henry Kissinger on his backside, President George W. Bush was
compelled by the Dec. 13 resignation to hang out the "help
wanted" sign again. Kissinger, the president's appointed
chairperson, was the panel's second senior member to bail out.
Just two days earlier, former Sen. George Mitchell had
bolted.
In January, the 10-member panel is supposed to start
scrutinizing circumstances surrounding the attacks on the World
Trade Center and Pentagon. Democrats can choose five members.
House Majority Leader Dennis Hastert and Trent Lott of
Mississippi--Senate GOP leader as of this writing--each selects
two. Bush handpicks the chair.
The Commander in Chief had dragged his heels on convening
the panel for more than a year, before signing an Act of
Congress that brought the Joint Commission into being on Nov.
27. He reportedly relented under the weight of widespread
accusations that his reluctance was due to the fact that the
commission is to release a report less than six months before
the 2004 election. That could very well leave his
administration with egg on its face.
The panel has been mired in strife since its onset. Partisan
wrangling broke out when the Oval Office issued a missive
mandating a majority of at least six votes to issue subpoenas
to impede Democrats from being able to serve the powerful
summonses on their own.
United Press International reports that, according to
unnamed White House sources, the day before Kissinger jumped
ship the commission still had no offices or desks--not even a
telephone number.
Kissinger, who was secretary of state under Richard Nixon,
came under fire from Senate Democrats who demanded he disclose
his international consulting firm's client list. The White
House countered that Kissinger needn't comply because he was
just a part-timer appointed by the president. After locking
horns with Democrats on the Senate's so-called ethics
committee, Kissinger stepped down.
He had been at the helm for only 16 days. He resigned just
24 hours after fruitlessly trying to guarantee loved ones of
Sept. 11 victims that his wining and dining with the corporate
and banking elite who have direct interests in U.S.
international policy would not conflict with his task.
National columnist Robert Scheer noted in the Dec. 16 Los
Angeles Times that Kissinger Associates is an "ultra-connected
consulting firm" that has engaged in financial wheeling and
dealing with Saudi Arabia and Kuwait. The firm employed both
Brent Scowcroft, who became national security advisor for
President George H.W. Bush, and Lawrence Eagleburger, secretary
of state in that administration.
"That those ties crisscross with other suspicious activities
of close Bush family advisors--including Poppy Bush's
consulting role with the Carlyle Group that took him to Saudi
Arabia to drum up business--makes Kissinger's selection as
understandable as it is dishonest."
No wonder President Bush wrote that he accepted Kissinger's
departure as head of the commission with regret. It's a tough
job to fill, calling for an adroit applicant skilled in the art
of cover-up.
In fact Scheer headlined his article: "Want a Cover-Up
Expert? Kissinger's Your Man." He wrote that Kissinger was "the
member of the Nixon White House most bent on destroying Daniel
Ellsberg for giving a copy of the Pentagon Papers, the
government's secret history of the Vietnam War, to the New York
Times. His obsession with preventing all government leaks,
except those of his creation, is well documented in the Nixon
tapes."
Scheer also recalled that Kissinger lied about the bombing
of Cambodia, the Watergate break-in of Democratic Party
headquarters and the death of the democratically elected leader
of Chile.
Another columnist, Andrew Greeley rhetorically asked in his
Dec. 13 Chicago Sun-Times article why Bush saw fit to appoint a
man with such a "legendary reputation for deception." He
queried: "Does he expect that Kissinger will add credibility to
the report? Or rather, does he hope that Kissinger will cover
up what needs to be covered up?"
Top Republicans certainly must have hoped that such a
prominent and prestigious statesperson as Kissinger would bring
a shovel of credibility to help clean up this Augean stable.
But when the opposition made a stink about his role, it became
clear he wasnup to the Herculean task.
A Dec. 14 New York Times editorial lost no time heralding
Kissinger's resignation, stressing, "The only way to conduct
such an inquiry is if all the commission members are free of
business interests that could influence their work."
It might be easier to locate the Holy Grail.
For now, Bush has reportedly drafted a Republican with a
much lower profile--former New Jersey Gov. Thomas H. Kean--to
fill Kissinger's wing-tip brogues.
Terrorist, war criminal
The problem is not just Kissinger's mendacity, not that he's
a closed-mouth, sneaky kind of guy with business conflicts of
interest.
Kissinger came onto the stage of U.S. politics as a trusted
aide to the Rockefeller oil and banking dynasty. And he proved
as secretary of state and national security advisor that his
business and political objectives were not at odds.
Kissinger and Nixon's secret bombing of Cambodia was an act
of terror that massacred an estimated 500,000 people.
Under the Nixon administration, Kissinger became synonymous
with the escalation of U.S. military aggression against
Vietnam, a war that claimed an estimated 3 million lives in
that country. He reportedly menaced the North Vietnamese with
weapons of mass destruction many times, repeatedly threatening
to drop nuclear weapons on the Asian socialist nation while at
the "peace" negotiations in Paris.
When the Nobel Peace Prize was bestowed on Kissinger in
1973, brilliant political satirist Tom Lehrer announced he was
retiring his musical performances. "It was at that moment that
satire died," Lehrer observed. "There was nothing more to say
after that."(BBC, Dec. 16)
The Machiavellian premise of Kis singer's book "Nuclear War
and Foreign Policy," published in 1957, was that limited atomic
war was winnable. Many people believe that Kissinger inspired
Jewish Hollywood director Stanley Kubrick's movie character
"Dr. Strangelove," whose arm spasmodically stiffened into "hail
Hitler" salutes. It was a razor-sharp condemnation that cut to
the bone. And it was well deserved.
Kissinger worked hand-in-glove with Nixon, a notorious
anti-Semite, to bolster the Israeli garrison state, protect Big
Oil interests in the Middle East and crush Palestinian
resistance.
Kissinger engineered the 1973 CIA coup that carried out a
"regime change" in Chile, resulting in the death of President
Salvador Allende, the slaughter of some 30,000 worker
organizers and torture and exile of tens of thousands more.
Kissinger carried out these and other high crimes against
humanity while orchestrating U.S. international policy from
1969 to 1976. That is why he is in the upper echelons of the
Empire that Washington wants to protect from any international
criminal court.
Kissinger has stepped back from the commission on Sept. 11.
Not good enough. He should be receiving a subpoena, not handing
them out, because he himself has been so instrumental in
fanning the flames of rage against the United States that
contributed to that disaster.
People all over the world and across the United States would
rejoice to see Kissinger in the docket of a genuine people's
war crimes tribunal.
Reprinted from the Dec. 26, 2002, issue of
Workers World newspaper
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