Former US National Security advisor and secretary of state, Henry Kissinger, died at the age of 100 this week. As the war criminals who have succeeded him hail his “diplomatic prowess” and “dependable and distinctive” voice on foreign affairs, the true measure of Kissinger’s own life is in the millions that he was responsible for extinguishing, from Chile to Vietnam.
Kissinger was appointed national security advisor after President Richard Nixon came to power in 1969, during the war in Vietnam. Having deferred peace talks, Kissinger and Nixon would work to expand the war by covertly carpet-bombing neighboring Cambodia under “Operation Menu”, ahead of a head-on invasion in 1970. By 1973, under Kissinger’s “anything that flies…anything that moves” directive, the US dropped approximately 500,000 tons of bombs on Cambodia.
Kissinger was jointly awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1973 along with North Vietnamese diplomat Lê Đức Thọ, who refused to receive it, for the signing of the very Paris Peace Accords Kissinger had had a hand in delaying.
Meanwhile, between 150,000 to 500,000 Cambodian civilians had been killed by 1973,with declassified records showing that Kissinger himself had approved each of the 3,875 bombing raids on the country.
“[t]ell the Cambodians that we will be friends with them. They are murderous thugs, but we won’t let that stand in our way,” Kissinger told the prime minister of Thailand at the time, months after the US-backed government was toppled in South Vietnam with the liberation of Saigon.
Between 1964 and 1973, the US would also drop over two million tons of explosive ordnance, including 260 million cluster munitions, on Laos— “the equivalent of a B52 planeload of cluster bombs…dropped every eight minutes for nine years” —making it the most bombed place on Earth. More than 50,000 have been killed by unexploded bombs in Laos, 20,000 since the end of the war.
The atrocities overseen by Kissinger in the region would pave the way for the destruction caused by the US empire in the coming decades. Speaking to The Intercept, historian and author Greg Grandin stated that , “The covert justifications for illegally bombing Cambodia became the framework for the justifications of drone strikes and forever war” — Afghanistan and Iraq, to Syria and Somalia— “It’s a perfect expression of American militarism’s unbroken circle.”
Cambodia was not the only genocide that Kissinger would facilitate. In 1971, the Pakistani military, under the command of Agha Muhammad Yahya Khan, unleashed a campaign of ethnic cleansing and mass murder to suppress the movement for independence by the Bengali population in what was at the time East Pakistan, and would ultimately become Bangladesh.
An estimated 300,000 to three million people were killed, over 200,000 Bengali women were raped and 10 million people became refugees during the genocide. The US stood firmly with Khan, who was a close ally at a time when Nixon and Kissinger were working to establish ties with China, even providing arms to Pakistani forces.
In 1975, then as Secretary of State in the administration of President Gerald Ford, Kissinger lent his support to military dictator Suharto of Indonesia to invade newly-independent East Timor– which the US had helped to keep under Portuguese colonial rule.
The invasion would take place within hours of a meeting between Suharto, Ford, and Kissinger, where the latter emphasized for the invasion to succeed “quickly”. 200,000 people would be killed as a result of the invasion and brutal occupation of East Timor.
Kissinger left his bloody handprints all over the world.
In 1970, the people of Chile elected Salvador Allende and the Popular Unity coalition to form the government. In 1971, the Chilean Congress would approve the nationalization of copper which had largely been under the control of US corporations. “With the step that we are going to take, we will break with our dependency, our economic dependency. That means political independence. We will be the owners of our own future, the true sovereigns of our own destiny,” Allende had declared.
On September 11, 1973, General Augusto Pinochet led sections of the army in a coup against Allende, with full-backing from the US. The White House had been plotting the overthrow before Allende had even been sworn-in, with Kissinger supervising covert operations. The US “created the conditions as great as possible”, he would inform Nixon just days before the coup.
Over 40,000 people were killed, disappeared, tortured or imprisoned over the 17-year-long Pinochet dictatorship. Meanwhile, the socialist program of the Allende government was systematically dismantled as Chile would become the epicenter of US-driven neoliberal policies.
“You did a great service to the West in overthrowing Allende,” Kissinger would tell Pinochet in 1976, capturing in his own words what the Allende victory in Chile signified for the Third World.
The same year, Kissinger gave the “green light” to the Dirty War being waged by the fascist military junta in Argentina, which had overthrown President Isabel Perón. Declassified documents showed that Kissinger, then Secretary of State, told the junta that “we would like you to succeed”. “If you can finish before Congress gets back, the better,” he had added, as the US Congress was set to approve sanctions against the military regime.
An estimated 30,000 Argentine civilians were tortured and disappeared during the Dirty War.
In Africa, Kissinger colluded with the South African apartheid regime during the war in Angola, providing arms to the National Liberation Front of Angola (FNLA) and the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola to repress the Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA). Kissinger would subsequently persuade South Africa, whose white supremacist apartheid regime was worried about what Angolan independence might mean for its control over the country and Namibia, to deploy troops to Angola in 1975.
Less than a month later, Cuba would send its forces to Angola in response to a request by the MPLA, and the apartheid forces would be halted and pushed back.
Kissinger has been held complicit in the prolongation of the war in Angola as well as the extension of apartheid rule. He would visit apartheid South Africa in 1976, the first US official to do so in three decades, in what was perceived as a major move granting legitimacy to the racist regime. The visit came months after the apartheid forces massacred between 176-700 people during the Soweto Uprising.
Part of Kissinger’s maneuvering in the Middle East included dispatching a massive amount of US weapons to the Israeli Occupation during the Arab-Israeli War in 1973, boasting later, “everyone knows in the Middle East that if they want a peace they have to go through us.”
After the end of his career in government, Kissinger would continue his war-mongering from the (not so) sidelines, advising those in power. Instead of a trial at the Hague, Kissinger received the US’ highest civilian honor in 2016.
Even though Kissinger has died, much of the brutal violence of imperialism that he represented and regularly weaponized stands, with the world watching yet another genocide unfold as US-made and funded bombs fall on Gaza.
