And Kissinger himself was everywhere -- ABC, NBC, CBS, PBS, on the radio, in the papers -- offering his opinion. "I think it's gone well," he said to Dan Rather that very night.
It would be a techno-display of such apparent omnipotence that President Bush got the kind of mass approval Kissinger and Nixon never dreamed possible. With instant replay came instant gratification, confirmation that the president had the public's backing. On January 18th, only a day into the assault, CBS announced that a new poll "indicates extremely strong support for Mr. Bush's Gulf offensive."
"By God," Bush said in triumph, "we've kicked the Vietnam syndrome once and for all."
Saddam Hussein's troops were easily driven out of Kuwait and, momentarily, it looked like the outcome would vindicate the logic behind Kissinger's and Nixon's covert Cambodian air campaign: that the US should be free to use whatever military force it needed to compel the political outcome it sought. It seemed as if the world Kissinger had long believed he ought to live in was finally coming into being.
...toward 9/11
Saddam Hussein, however, remained in power in Baghdad, creating a problem of enormous proportions for Bush's successor, Bill Clinton. Increasingly onerous sanctions, punctuated by occasional cruise missile attacks on Baghdad, only added to the crisis. Children were starving; civilians were being killed by U.S. missiles; and the Baathist regime refused to budge.
Kissinger watched all of this with a kind of detached amusement. In a way, Clinton was following his lead: he was bombing a country with which we weren't at war and without congressional approval in part to placate the militarist right. In 1998, at a conference commemorating the 25th anniversary of the accords that ended the Vietnam War, Kissinger expressed his opinion on Iraq. The real "problem," he said, is will. You need to be willing to "break the back" of somebody you refuse to negotiate with, just as he and Nixon had done in Southeast Asia. "Whether we got it right or not," Kissinger added, "is really secondary."
That should count as a remarkable statement in the annals of "political realism."
Not surprisingly then, in the wake of 9/11, Kissinger was an early supporter of a bold military response. On August 9, 2002, for instance, he endorsed a policy of regime change in Iraq in his syndicated column, acknowledging it as "revolutionary." "The notion of justified pre-emption," he wrote, "runs counter to modern international law," but was nonetheless necessary because of the novelty of the "terrorist threat," which "transcends the nation-state."
There was, however, "another, generally unstated, reason for bringing matters to a head with Iraq": to "demonstrate that a terrorist challenge or a systemic attack on the international order also produces catastrophic consequences for the perpetrators, as well as their supporters." To be -- in true Kissingerian fashion -- in the good graces of the most militaristic members of an American administration, the ultimate political "realist" was, in other words, perfectly willing to ignore that the secular Baathists of Baghdad were the enemies of Islamic jihadists, and that Iraq had neither perpetrated 9/11 nor supported the perpetrators of 9/11. After all, being "right or not is really secondary" to the main issue: being willing to do something decisive, especially use air power to "break the back" of... well, whomever.
Less than three weeks later, Vice President Dick Cheney, laying out his case for an invasion of Iraq before the national convention of Veterans of Foreign Wars, quoted directly from Kissinger's column. "As former Secretary of State Kissinger recently stated," said Cheney, there is "an imperative for pre-emptive action."
In 2005, after the revelations about the cooking of intelligence and the manipulation of the press to neutralize opposition to the invasion of Iraq, after Fallujah and Abu Ghraib, after it became clear that the real beneficiary of the occupation would be revolutionary Iran, Michael Gerson, George W. Bush's speechwriter, paid a visit to Kissinger in New York. Public support for the war was by then plummeting and Bush's justifications for waging it expanding. America's "responsibility," he had announced earlier that year in his second inaugural address, was to "rid the world of evil."
Gerson, who had helped write that speech, asked Kissinger what he thought of it. "At first I was appalled," Kissinger said, but then he came to appreciate it for instrumental reasons. "On reflection," as Bob Woodward recounted in his book State of Denial, he "now believed the speech served a purpose and was a very smart move, setting the war on terror and overall U.S. foreign policy in the context of American values. That would help sustain a long campaign."
At that meeting, Kissinger gave Gerson a copy of an infamous memo he had written Nixon in 1969 and asked him to pass it along to Bush. "Withdrawal of U.S. troops will become like salted peanuts to the American public," he had warned, "the more U.S. troops come home, the more will be demanded." Don't get caught in that trap, Kissinger told Gerson, for once withdrawals start, it will become "harder and harder to maintain the morale of those who remain, not to speak of their mothers."
Kissinger then reminisced about Vietnam, reminding Gerson that incentives offered through negotiations must be backed up by credible threats of an unrestrained nature. As an example, he brought up one of the many "major" ultimatums he had given the North Vietnamese, warning of "dire consequences" if they didn't offer the concessions needed for the U.S. to withdraw from Vietnam "with honor." They didn't.
"I didn't have enough power," was how Kissinger summarized his experience more than three decades later.
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