Mr. K ...

Gotta bust this one out today

He's finally dead. Brilliant, ruthless and a decorated war criminal, the death of Cambodia was the arch creation of Mr. K, the model Secretary of State who orchestrated Nam for Nixon, a catastrophe of biblical proportions, based on a lie.

LONGTIME FOREVER WARS READERS will remember that back in June of 2022 I mentioned a "very long obituary I recently finished for a major magazine" about Henry Kissinger. The strange thing about preparing an obituary of Kissinger is that while you write it, you have no choice but to think: please don't let Kissinger die before I'm done. But last night my wife ran over to me phone-first to show me that he had finally died. So, finally, here is "Henry Kissinger, War Criminal Beloved by America's Ruling Class, Finally Dies." If the piece feels like it takes too long to reach its end, well, I'm just marrying form and content. 

Rolling Stone editor Noah Shachtman, twice my boss and forever my friend, commissioned this piece from me a while ago. After I wrote a Donald Rumsfeld obituary for him at The Daily Beast in 2021, it only made sense. I knew from more than 13 years of working with Noah that he wouldn't restrain me from using plain language like "war criminal." His headline for the Rumsfeld one was "Donald Rumsfeld, Killer of 400,000 People, Dies Peacefully." (The Kissinger one was a rare headline that I wrote.) 

A truly great obit ...

Watergate was a grim demonstration, for neither the first nor the last time, that the crimes America commits abroad have a dialectical relationship with the crimes that America commits at home. Infamy has as many fathers as victory. 

That, ultimately, is why Kissinger died a celebrity, with the wealth necessary to get taken in by Theranos. It is why Roger Morris and Anthony Lake opted against telling the country that the commander-in-chief was an alcoholic who was secretly surveilling his real and imagined critics. Whatever Kissinger’s origins, whatever rants about Jewboys he had to endure, Kissinger was an exemplar of the self-confident geopolitical potency that America’s elites, whatever they might personally think of Henry Kissinger, want America to make the world respect. When the Roger Morrises and Anthony Lakes and Hillary Clintons see Henry Kissinger, they see, despite what they will rotely and euphemistically acknowledge as his flaws, themselves as they wish to be. - Spencer Ackerman 

Addendum: Yet another take on Mr. K. Well worth reading IMHO.

Michael Avedon/August

Henry Kissinger, the Hypocrite

From 1969 to 1977, Mr. Kissinger established himself as one of the most powerful functionaries in history. For a portion of that time, he was the only person ever to serve concurrently as national security adviser and secretary of state, two very different jobs that simultaneously made him responsible for shaping and carrying out American foreign policy. If his German Jewish origins and accented English set him apart, the ease with which he wielded power made him a natural avatar for an American national security state that grew and gained momentum through the 20th century, like an organism that survives by enlarging itself.

Mr. Kissinger was not uncomfortable with that dynamic. For him, credibility was rooted in what you did more than what you stood for, even when those actions rendered American concepts of human rights and international law void. He helped extend the war in Vietnam and expand it to Cambodia and Laos, where the United States rained down more bombs than it dropped on Germany and Japan in World War II. That bombing — often indiscriminately massacring civilians — did nothing to improve the terms on which the Vietnam War ended; if anything, it just indicated the lengths to which the United States would go to express its displeasure at losing.

It is ironic that this brand of realism reached its apex at the height of the Cold War, a conflict that was ostensibly about ideology. From the side of the free world, Mr. Kissinger backed genocidal campaigns — by Pakistan against Bengalis and by Indonesia against the East Timorese. In Chile he has been accused of helping to lay the groundwork for a military coup that led to the death of Salvador Allende, the elected leftist president, while ushering in a terrible period of autocratic rule. The generous defense is that Mr. Kissinger represented an ethos that saw the ends (the defeat of the Soviet Union and revolutionary Communism) as justifying the means. But for huge swaths of the world, this mind-set carried a brutal message that America has often conveyed to its own marginalized populations: We care about democracy for us, not for them. Shortly before Mr. Allende’s victory, Mr. Kissinger said, “The issues are much too important for the Chilean voters to be left to decide for themselves.”

Any questions?