Kissinger Still Giving Bad Advice

October 8th, 2006 at 10:09 Björn Hallberg

Macabre and significant yet strangely underreported. Could someone please drive a stake through his heart already.

Kissinger, according to Woodward’s book, apparently has convinced the Bush White House that any troop withdrawals from Iraq will start a wave of public pressure to pull out all U.S. forces from Iraq. He is probably right in this analysis. But Kissinger missed the main lesson of Vietnam and is now missing it in Iraq. As the U.S. generals in Iraq know, killing more Sunni insurgents and Shi’ite militiamen than the United States loses of its own troops will not win a war that is fundamentally political. As Lt. Gen. William Odom (ret.), former Director of the National Security Agency and opponent of the war, has noted, the Iraq situation will continue to deteriorate and the United States will eventually be forced to withdraw from Iraq. So withdrawing sooner, rather than later, according to Odom, will save U.S. lives and money and salvage what international prestige the United States has left. If Nixon and Kissinger had followed similar advice in Vietnam, the United States, its military, and its international standing would not have been tarnished by four additional years of war. And even worse than Vietnam, continued U.S. occupation of Iraq is fueling and worsening the Islamic terrorist threat to the United States, according to an estimate from Bush’s own intelligence agencies.

Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger came into office in 1969 vowing to get the United States out of Vietnam, while achieving “peace with honor.” Four years and 22,000 American casualties later, Nixon and Kissinger settled for a face-saving peace settlement that they could have obtained shortly after they took office. The final agreement merely provided a “decent interval” between U.S. troop withdrawal and the fall of the South Vietnamese regime to the communists.

Yet Kissinger’s version of these events is that by 1972, the United States had virtually won the Vietnam War, but Congress and the American people wimped out and snatched defeat out of the jaws of victory. Although the U.S. bombing of North Vietnam in the Linebacker II air offensive of 1972 and threats of using nuclear weapons probably led the North Vietnamese to negotiate more seriously, Kissinger’s argument that the United States had “won” the war is a fantasy.

Kissinger will always be the same narcissistic sycophant. What is really mind-boggling through all of this is that people still take him seriously enough, to the point of reverence, to base policy decisions on his fantasies.

Oh, and for those that missed it, Kissinger also had a private audience with Pope Benedict XVI on September 29th. Really. No really.

Entry 642 filed under: Middle East. This entry was posted 1 year, 12 months ago. RSS feed for comments on this post.