Hi
here how evry Muslim feel today in USA.
Trump and Carson was one who want to bee prezident of USA and do it how this
text say.
.
I have a Muslim friend who happens to work close to my place of work and so
we often meet and, as he is as much a political junkie as I am, we
inevitably talk about the presidential election. He is married and has two
children. And he has been growing more and more despondent over the past few
months. We met today and I was startled to hear him talk about how he feels
and what his fears are for the future. Startled, because he is the
quintessential optimist and because we both live in New York where religion
is not usually an issue. Startled, moreover, because although I have
followed the current wave of gratuitous Islamophobia on display in the GOP
field (see my diary here) I had not realized how far things have gone and
because, frankly, only Muslims know the many ways in which they feel
threatened or degraded by what is occurring.
He told me that at his son’s school, some kid told his boy that “all Muslims
should go to jail”. This after the hoopla surrounding Ahmed Mohamed’s clock
that has become a landmark for the conservative xenophobic circus of
politicians and media pundits. And that a teacher said something to the
effect that it was “inevitable” that sooner or later the United States will
have to simply nuke the Muslim world and “solve all these problems”.
“Where can we go,” my friend said, “how will I start again from scratch?” I
realized with a shock that he has been thinking and quite seriously about
leaving the country. Upon probing further, I realized he believes that a
wave of Islamophobia is on the horizon. “If not this time,” he said, meaning
the 2016 election, “then sometime soon” the country will elect someone in
the mold of Trump or Palin and it will become intolerable for Muslims to
live here.
.
Seeing him like this has made me angry.
And it should make any patriotic American angry. I said above that the GOP’s
Islamophobia is gratuitous. And I stand by this statement. There is
absolutely no reason for it. Quite apart from being appalled that a 13-year
old kid should be told that he and his co-religionists deserve jail and/or
death, I am disgusted by the short-sightedness of people who continue to
stir anti-Islamic passions.
First of all, we need to realize that it is in the Western world’s power,
right now, to nurture the moderate, peaceful tradition of Islam that we have
all been yearning about. Why? Because for many of the Muslims who come to
live in the United States (and those who have been living here for
generations) as well as for many of the refugees who are knocking on the
doors of Europe, there is no more immediate concern than the concern that is
common to all of us – to have a peaceful life, to devote time to raising
their families, to ensure their children have a better future. In the
meantime, they would like to worship in peace. Isn’t this what the United
States is about? Isn’t it?
If we accept them here, if Europe accepts them. If they feel welcome, feel
like a part of the community, then don’t you see? They will have a stake in
our democracy, they will have a stake in preserving the spirit and tradition
of tolerance. For, as my friend says, where else can they go? I ask you…
Where else can our Muslim citizens find the kind of life that they have
here? The (relative) peace – I say relative because it cannot be really
complete with what has been occurring – the freedom to pursue careers and
self-enrichment (in the spiritual sense). I ask you… Where else?
It is time for us to realize that we, here, in the US and Europe PROVIDE the
alternative to ISIS and al Queda. By embracing the Muslim community and
making them feel at home, we do nothing less than prove all radical and
militant Muslims the world over WRONG. We need this. We need this not merely
from a strategic point of view – in the sense that having a peaceful and
democratically integrated Muslim community is good for our country and good
for the world. We also need it because believe it or not there are those
Muslims who are not plotting the Islamic takeover of the United States, or
the next spectacular terror attack. There are those of them who simply want
what we all want – to live well, raise a family, have kids and grandkids.
Secondly, though, we have to realize that Islamophobia has become
fashionable among the GOP not merely because the 9/11 psychosis and not
merely because a lot of GOP voters have no understanding of Islam but have
been taught to fear and loathe it. We have to realize that Islamophobia is
nothing less than the sublimation of racism that has gripped the rightwing
conservatives, from Evangelical crazies to run-of-the-mill Tea Party
racists. When an African American is president, when a gun wielding white
supremacist wacko single-handedly (and VERY VERY unintentionally) brought
down the Confederate flag throughout the South, and in the wake of Ferguson
and Baltimore and Black Lives Matter, Islamophobia is the only socially
accepted racism that can be spouted by public figures with a great deal of
impunity. It is the latest expression of the “other” that we have to fear
and fight. The latest incarnation of the public enemy.
I am really glad that both Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton came out and
declared Carson’s remarks unacceptable. I am even gladder that some in the
GOP field (Lindsay Graham and Ted Cruz of all people) took him to task.
Carson, as an African American, should be especially ashamed of himself for
what he said and I am especially angry at him for having said it.
But it is not enough.
We need to make sure our Muslim American citizens feel integrated and
appreciated. Like I said in my previous diary, America is the place of hope
and the place of peace. That hope and that peace is for EVERYONE who is a
citizen. It is why China can never replace America as a cultural symbol. It
is why America remains and abides … We need to make sure America remains
what it is meant to be. The GOP has apparently decided otherwise. So, it is
up to us.
3:20 PM PT:
-----Original Message-----
From: abdulah aga
Sent: Monday, September 28, 2015 10:43 AM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: Tomgram: Greg Grandin, Henry of Arabia
What to say here?
I can only say that vasinkton follows Hitler's policies,
Divide and Conquer:
From what Tom wrote that mean it.
While Vasinkton and Moscow created the policy of the Cold War,
in cooperation together so long on the other hand are not persecuted
throughout the world
but also their own sittyzent,
now they are make sympathies for socialism in America, and sympathy for
the alleged democracy in Moscow:
for it all the time Moscow and Vasinkton secretly was alise.
For that time they are persecuted communists in America Karl knows best,
While in Moscow, as we know millions were killed so-called democrats and
traitors or spies, which is also happening in Vasinktonu,
it is still continuing persecution of people what they are called spies and
enemies of America, only a hundred now no longer the communist nider
socialists,
now taking place
Muslims so-called enemy Now Muslim is enemy 1 American.
Most western service working for the US secret service in the world and
translates its sittysent the various hearings, not as trets own countries,
but as folo threat to America as straight slavery of these American allies.
Stables other than slavery if a nation can point a finger in all other
countries in its sittysent and to say whom to arrest anyone who is not as
USA thinks he or she can bee torture and interrogate anyone then it is no
longer ally thanit is slavery.
Since we know that all emails read and follow all sittysent American and
especially Muslims,
therefore my dear friends to this list and do not be surprised if I am away
on this list,
because I more may not excluded.
Today everything is possible and especially finding the enemy in order to
divide and rule.
As we know the economy is weak and, to make things strayed economic times,
suffering from sittysent poor then the smarter way by already tested recipe
locate the enemy and poot them in jel it because it's good for
sittysent good will, and as the river enemy number one today
by American Media are Muslims.
Text me not iznenadzuje, because I already wrote recently about Palestine
and the Arab or
Muslim ummah illiteracy, pohlepljivosti and their stupidity,
and with them a couple of them that just give you too for your own sittysent
who cares.
because we have Iraq, Palestine, Afghanistan, Syria, Yemen
tomorrow will come Saudi Arabia and that's it,
Saudi Arabia will come when dessert for winning the pole.
-----Original Message-----
From: Miriam Vieni
Sent: Sunday, September 27, 2015 5:47 PM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] Tomgram: Greg Grandin, Henry of Arabia
Tomgram: Greg Grandin, Henry of Arabia
By Greg Grandin
Posted on September 27, 2015, Printed on September 27, 2015
http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/176049/
Why do I always seem to be writing about Henry Kissinger?
I once listened to the man who helped prolong the Vietnam War for half a
decade declare that its "tragedy" lay in the fact "that the faith of
Americans in each other became destroyed in the process." I later took to
the (web)pages of the New York Times to suggest that perhaps "the pain
endured by millions of survivors in Vietnam who lost family, the pain of
millions who were wounded, of millions who were killed, of millions driven
from their homes into slums and [refugee] camps reeking of squalor" was a
greater tragedy.
Then there was that book review for the Daily Beast on the forgotten
genocide in Bangladesh. Wouldn't you know that Kissinger was completely
wrapped up in it? He and his boss President Richard Nixon, in fact,
conspired to support "Pakistan's fiercely anti-communist Muslim military
ruler in the face of his 1971 mass murder of mostly Hindu Bengalis who were
seeking political autonomy and, ultimately, their own independent nation."
Frightening as it may seem, during this episode Nixon proved to be the voice
of reason as Kissinger apparently pushed to escalate the conflict into a
showdown with the Soviets.
Earlier this year, in the pages of The Nation, I found myself writing yet
again about the former national security adviser and secretary of state,
this time for his role in Rory Kennedy's Oscar-nominated documentary, Last
Days in Vietnam:
"Kissinger -- architect of the secret, murderous bombing of neighboring
Cambodia and top adviser to a president who resigned rather than face
impeachment -- is given carte blanche to craft his own self-serving version
of history and to champion another former boss, President Ford, as a
humanitarian."
Of course, Kissinger's name and handiwork also show up in my book on
American war crimes in Vietnam, Kill Anything That Moves. And here I am
again writing about the man, an activity that's starting to look almost
obsessive, so let me explain. One day in the early 2000s, I found myself on
a street in New York City watching as Kissinger was hustled away amid a sea
of roiling vitriol. "War criminal," shouted the protesters. "You've got
blood on your hands, Henry." It wasn't quite clear whose blood they were
referring to. It might have been that of Cambodians. Unless it was
Vietnamese. Or Laotians. Or Chileans. Or Bangladeshis. Or East Timorese.
From one corner of the world to another, Kissinger seems to have had a hand
in a remarkable number of untoward acts of state.
And as TomDispatch regular Greg Grandin suggests today, that's only the
beginning of a grim list of nations. Just as the United States was
extricating itself from its long debacle in Indochina, Grandin points out,
it was embarking on what would become another festering fiasco. If George W.
Bush blew a hole through the Greater Middle East, Henry Kissinger lit the
fuse. Today, we're still dealing with the hellacious fallout of Kissinger's
in-office foreign policy machinations and out-of-office wise-man advice as
the Greater Middle East hemorrhages lives and refugees.
This revelation and a raft of others figure in Grandin's latest book,
Kissinger's Shadow: The Long Reach of America's Most Controversial
Statesman, which paints a stunning portrait of that consummate political
chameleon and offers answers about how and why the world is so destabilized
and why so much of it can be traced, at least in part, to the United States
and its senior statesman, Henry the K. Andrew Bacevich calls Grandin's book
a "tour de force" and Publisher's Weekly says ardent Kissinger foes will be
"enthralled," so pick up a copy after you're done reading about the CEO
emeritus of Debacle, Inc. Nick Turse
Debacle, Inc.
How Henry Kissinger Helped Create Our "Proliferated" World
By Greg Grandin
The only person Henry Kissinger flattered more than President Richard Nixon
was Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the Shah of Iran. In the early 1970s, the Shah,
sitting atop an enormous reserve of increasingly expensive oil and a key
figure in Nixon and Kissinger's move into the Middle East, wanted to be
dealt with as a serious person. He expected his country to be treated with
the same respect Washington showed other key Cold War allies like West
Germany and Great Britain. As Nixon's national security adviser and, after
1973, secretary of state, Kissinger's job was to pump up the Shah, to make
him feel like he truly was the "king of kings."
Reading the diplomatic record, it's hard not to imagine his weariness as he
prepared for his sessions with the Shah, considering just what gestures and
words would be needed to make it clear that his majesty truly mattered to
Washington, that he was valued beyond compare. "Let's see," an aide who was
helping Kissinger get ready for one such meeting said, "the Shah will want
to talk about Pakistan, Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia, the Gulf, the Kurds, and
Brezhnev."
During another prep, Kissinger was told that "the Shah wants to ride in an
F-14." Silence ensued. Then Kissinger began to think aloud about how to
flatter the monarch into abandoning the idea. "We can say," he began, "that
if he has his heart set on it, okay, but the President would feel easier if
he didn't have that one worry in 10,000 [that the plane might crash]. The
Shah will be flattered." Once, Nixon asked Kissinger to book the entertainer
Danny Kaye for a private performance for the Shah and his wife.
The 92-year-old Kissinger has a long history of involvement in Iran and his
recent opposition to Barack Obama's Iran nuclear deal, while relatively
subdued by present Washington standards, matters. In it lies a certain
irony, given his own largely unexamined record in the region. Kissinger's
criticism has focused mostly on warning that the deal might provoke a
regional nuclear arms race as Sunni states led by Saudi Arabia line up
against Shia Iran. "We will live in a proliferated world," he said in
testimony before the Senate. In a Wall Street Journal op-ed co-authored with
another former secretary of state, George Shultz, Kissinger worried that, as
the region "trends toward sectarian upheaval" and "state collapse," the
"disequilibrium of power" might likely tilt toward Tehran.
Of all people, Kissinger knows well how easily the best laid plans can go
astray and careen toward disaster. The former diplomat is by no means solely
responsible for the mess that is today's Middle East. There is, of course,
George W. Bush's 2003 invasion of Iraq (which Kissinger supported). But he
does bear far more responsibility for our proliferated world's
disequilibrium of power than anyone usually recognizes.
Some of his Middle East policies are well known. In early 1974, for
instance, his so-called shuttle diplomacy helped deescalate the tensions
that had led to the previous year's Arab-Israeli War. At the same time,
however, it locked in Israel's veto over U.S. foreign policy for decades to
come. And in December 1975, wrongly believing that he had worked out a
lasting pro-American balance of power between Iran and Iraq, Kissinger
withdrew his previous support from the Kurds (whom he had been using as
agents of destabilization against Baghdad's Baathists). Iraq moved quickly
to launch an assault on the Kurds that killed thousands and then implemented
a program of ethnic cleansing, forcibly relocating Kurdish survivors and
moving Arabs into their homes. "Even in the context of covert action ours
was a cynical enterprise," noted a Congressional investigation into his
sacrifice of the Kurds.
Less well known is the way in which Kissinger's policies toward Iran and
Saudi Arabia accelerated the radicalization in the region, how step by
catastrophic step he laid the groundwork for the region's spiraling crises
of the present moment.
Guardian of the Gulf
Most critical histories of U.S. involvement in Iran rightly began with the
joint British-U.S. coup against democratically elected Prime Minister
Mohammad Mosaddegh in 1953, which installed Pahlavi on the Peacock Throne.
But it was Kissinger who, in 1972, greatly deepened the relationship between
Washington and Tehran. He was the one who began a policy of unconditional
support for the Shah as a way to steady American power in the Persian Gulf
while the U.S. extracted itself from Southeast Asia. As James Schlesinger,
who served as Nixon's CIA director and secretary of defense, noted, if "we
were going to make the Shah the Guardian of the Gulf, we've got to give him
what he needs." Which, Schlesinger added, really meant "giving him what he
wants."
What the Shah wanted most of all were weapons of every variety -- and
American military trainers, and a navy, and an air force. It was Kissinger
who overrode State Department and Pentagon objections and gave the Shah what
no other country had: the ability to buy anything he wanted from U.S.
weapons makers.
"We are looking for a navy," the Shah told Kissinger in 1973, "we have a
large shopping list." And so Kissinger let him buy a navy.
By 1976, Kissinger's last full year in office, Iran had become the largest
purchaser of American weaponry and housed the largest contingent of U.S.
military advisors anywhere on the planet. By 1977, the historian Ervand
Abrahamian notes, "the shah had the largest navy in the Persian Gulf, the
largest air force in Western Asia, and the fifth-largest army in the whole
world." That meant, just to begin a list, thousands of modern tanks,
hundreds of helicopters, F-4 and F-5 fighter jets, dozens of hovercraft,
long-range artillery pieces, and Maverick missiles. The next year, the Shah
bought another $12 billion worth of equipment.
After Kissinger left office, the special relationship he had worked so hard
to establish blew up with the Iranian Revolution of 1979, the flight of the
Shah, the coming to power of Ayatollah Khomeini, and the taking of the U.S.
Embassy in Tehran (and its occupants as hostages) by student protesters.
Washington's political class is still trying to dig itself out of the
rubble. A number of high-ranking Middle East policymakers and experts held
Kissinger directly responsible for the disaster, especially career diplomat
George Ball, who called Kissinger's Iran policy an "act of folly."
Kissinger is deft at deflecting attention from this history. After a speech
at Annapolis in 2007, a cadet wanted to know why he had sold weapons to the
Shah of Iran when "he knew the nature of his regime?"
"Every American government from the 1950s on cooperated with the Shah of
Iran," Kissinger answered. He continued: "Iran is a crucial piece of
strategic real estate, and the fact that it is now in adversarial hands
shows why we cooperated with the Shah of Iran. Why did we sell weapons to
him? Because he was willing to defend himself and because his defense was in
our interest. And again, I simply don't understand why we have to apologize
for defending the American national interest, which was also in the national
interest of that region."
This account carefully omits his role in greatly escalating the support
provided to the Shah, including to his infamous SAVAK torturers -- the
agents of his murderous, U.S.-trained secret police-cum-death-squad -- who
upheld his regime. Each maimed body or disappeared family member was one
more klick on the road to revolution. As George Ball's biographer, James
Bill, writes: considering the "manifest failure" of Kissinger's Iran policy,
"it is worthy of note that in his two massive volumes of political memoirs
totalling twenty-eight-hundred pages, Kissinger devoted less than twenty
pages to the Iranian revolution and U.S.-Iran relations."
After the Shah fell, the ayatollahs were the beneficiaries of Kissinger's
arms largess, inheriting billions of dollars of warships, tanks, fighter
jets, guns, and other materiel. It was also Kissinger who successfully urged
the Carter administration to grant the Shah asylum in the United States,
which hastened the deterioration of relations between Tehran and Washington,
precipitating the embassy hostage crisis.
Then, in 1980, Saddam Hussein's Iraq invaded Iran, beginning a war that
consumed hundreds of thousands of lives. The administration of Ronald Reagan
"tilted" toward Baghdad, providing battlefield intelligence used to launch
lethal sarin gas attacks on Iranian troops. At the same time, the White
House illegally and infamously trafficked high-tech weaponry to
revolutionary Iran as part of what became the Iran-Contra affair.
"It's a pity they can't both lose," Kissinger is reported to have said of
Iran and Iraq. Although that quotation is hard to confirm, Raymond Tanter,
who served on the National Security Council, reports that, at a
foreign-policy briefing for Republican presidential nominee Ronald Reagan in
October 1980, Kissinger suggested "the continuation of fighting between Iran
and Iraq was in the American interest." Having bet (and lost) on the Shah,
Kissinger now hoped to make the best of a bad war. The U.S., he counselled
Reagan, "should capitalize on continuing hostilities."
Saudi Arabia and the Petrodollar Fix
Kissinger's other "guardian" of the Gulf, Sunni Saudi Arabia, however,
didn't fall and he did everything he could to turn that already close
relationship into an ironclad alliance. In 1975, he signaled what was to
come by working out an arms deal for the Saudi regime similar to the one he
had green-lighted for Tehran, including a $750 million contract for the sale
of 60 F-5E/F fighters to the sheiks. By this time, the U.S. already had more
than a trillion dollars' worth of military agreements with Riyadh. Only Iran
had more.
Like Tehran, Riyadh paid for this flood of weaponry with the proceeds from
rising oil prices. The word "petrodollar," according to the Los Angeles
Times, was coined in late 1973, and introduced into English by New York
investment bankers who were courting the oil-producing countries of the
Middle East. Soon enough, as that paper wrote, the petrodollar had become
part of "the world's macroeconomic interface" and crucial to Kissinger's
developing Middle Eastern policy.
By June 1974, Treasury Secretary George Shultz was already suggesting that
rising oil prices could result in a "highly advantageous mutual bargain"
between the U.S. and petroleum-producing countries in the Middle East. Such
a "bargain," as others then began to argue, might solve a number of
problems, creating demand for the U.S. dollar, injecting needed money into a
flagging defense industry hard hit by the Vietnam wind-down, and using
petrodollars to cover mounting trade deficits.
As it happened, petrodollars would prove anything but a quick fix. High
energy prices were a drag on the U.S. economy, with inflation and high
interest rates remaining a problem for nearly a decade. Nor was petrodollar
dependence part of any preconceived Kissingerian "plan." As with far more
of his moves than he or his admirers now care to admit, he more or less
stumbled into it. This was why, in periodic frustration, he occasionally
daydreamed about simply seizing the oil fields of the Arabian peninsula and
doing away with all the developing economic troubles.
"Can't we overthrow one of the sheikhs just to show that we can do it?" he
wondered in November 1973, fantasizing about which gas-pump country he could
knock off. "How about Abu Dhabi?" he later asked. (Imagine what the world
would be like today had Kissinger, in the fall of 1973, moved to overthrow
the Saudi regime rather than Chile's democratically elected president,
Salvador Allende.) "Let's work out a plan for grabbing some Middle East oil
if we want," Kissinger said.
Such scimitar rattling was, however, pure posturing. Not only did Kissinger
broker the various deals that got the U.S. hooked on recycled Saudi
petrodollars, he also began to promote the idea of an "oil floor price"
below which the cost per barrel wouldn't fall. Among other things, this
scheme was meant to protect the Saudis (and Iran, until 1979) from a sudden
drop in demand and provide U.S. petroleum corporations with guaranteed
profit margins.
Stephen Walt, a scholar of international relations, writes: "By the end of
1975, more than six thousand Americans were engaged in military-related
activities in Saudi Arabia. Saudi arms purchased for the period 1974-1975
totaled over $3.8 billion, and a bewildering array of training missions and
construction projects worth over $10 billion were now underway."
Since the 1970s, one administration after another has found the iron-clad
alliance Kissinger deepened between the House of Saud's medieval "moderates"
and Washington indispensable not only to keep the oil flowing but as a
balance against Shia radicalism and secular nationalism of every sort.
Recently, however, a series of world-historical events has shattered the
context in which that alliance seemed to make sense. These include: the
catastrophic war on and occupation of Iraq, the Arab Spring, the Syrian
uprising and ensuing civil war, the rise of ISIS, Israel's rightwing lurch,
the conflict in Yemen, the falling price of petroleum, and, now, Obama's
Iran deal.
But the arms spigot that Kissinger turned on still remains wide open.
According to the New York Times, "Saudi Arabia spent more than $80 billion
on weaponry last year -- the most ever, and more than either France or
Britain -- and has become the world's fourth-largest defense market." Just
as they did after the Vietnam drawdown, U.S. weapons manufacturing are
compensating for limits on the defense budget at home by selling arms to
Gulf states. The "proxy wars in the Middle East could last for years," write
Mark Mazzetti and Helene Cooper of the New York Times, "which will make
countries in the region even more eager for the F-35 fighter jet, considered
to be the jewel of America's future arsenal of weapons. The plane, the
world's most expensive weapons project, has stealth capabilities and has
been marketed heavily to European and Asian allies. It has not yet been
peddled to Arab allies because of concerns about preserving Israel's
military edge."
If fortune is really shining on Lockheed and Boeing, Kissinger's prediction
that Obama's de-escalation of tensions with Tehran will sooner or later
prompt Saudi-Iranian hostilities will pan out. "With the balance of power in
the Middle East in flux, several defense analysts said that could change.
Russia is a major arms supplier to Iran, and a decision by President
Vladimir Putin to sell an advanced air defense system to Iran could increase
demand for the F-35, which is likely to have the ability to penetrate
Russian-made defenses," the Times reports.
"This could be the precipitating event: the emerging Sunni-Shia civil war
coupled with the sale of advanced Russian air defense systems to Iran," said
one defense analyst. "If anything is going to result in F-35 clearance to
the gulf states, this is the combination of events.'"
Into Afghanistan
If all Henry Kissinger contributed to the Middle East were a regional arms
race, petrodollar addiction, Iranian radicalization, and the Tehran-Riyadh
conflict, it would be bad enough. His legacy, however, is far worse than
that: he has to answer for his role in the rise of political Islam.
In July 1973, after a coup in Afghanistan brought to power a moderate,
secular, but Soviet-leaning republican government, the Shah, then
approaching the height of his influence with Kissinger, pressed his
advantage. He asked for even more military assistance. Now, he said, he
"must cover the East with fighter aircraft." Kissinger complied.
Tehran also began to meddle in Afghan politics, offering Kabul billions of
dollars for development and security, in exchange for loosening "its ties
with the Soviet Union." This might have seemed a reasonably peaceful way to
increase U.S. influence via Iran over Kabul. It was, however, paired with an
explosive initiative: via SAVAK, the Shah's secret police, and Pakistan's
Inter-Services Intelligence agency (ISI), extremist Islamic insurgents were
to be slipped into Afghanistan to destabilize Kabul's republican government.
Kissinger, who knew his British and his Russian imperial history, had long
considered Pakistan of strategic importance. "The defense of Afghanistan,"
he wrote in 1955, "depends on the strength of Pakistan." But before he could
put Pakistan into play against the Soviets in Afghanistan, he had to perfume
away the stink of genocide. In 1971, that country had launched a bloodbath
in East Pakistan (now Bangladesh), with Nixon and Kissinger standing
"stoutly behind Pakistan's generals, supporting the murderous regime at many
of the most crucial moments," as Gary Bass has detailed. The president and
his national security adviser, Bass writes, "vigorously supported the
killers and tormentors of a generation of Bangladeshis."
Because of that genocidal campaign, the State Department, acting against
Kissinger's wishes, had cut off military aid to the country in 1971, though
Nixon and Kissinger kept it flowing covertly via Iran. In 1975, Kissinger
vigorously pushed for its full, formal restoration, even as he was offering
his tacit approval to Maoist China to back Pakistan whose leaders had their
own reasons for wanting to destabilize Afghanistan, having to do with border
disputes and the ongoing rivalry with India.
Kissinger helped make that possible, in part by the key role he played in
building up Pakistan as part of a regional strategy in which Iran and Saudi
Arabia were similarly deputized to do his dirty work. When Pakistani Prime
Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, who had backed the 1971 rampage in East
Pakistan, visited Washington in 1975 to make the case for restoration of
military aid, Kissinger assured President Gerald Ford that he "was great in
'71." Ford agreed, and U.S. dollars soon started to flow directly to the
Pakistani army and intelligence service.
As national security adviser and then secretary of state, Kissinger was
directly involved in planning and executing covert actions in such diverse
places as Cambodia, Angola, and Chile. No available information indicates
that he ever directly encouraged Pakistan's ISI or Iran's SAVAK to
destabilize Afghanistan. But we don't need a smoking gun to appreciate the
larger context and consequences of his many regional initiatives in what, in
the twenty-first century, would come to be known in Washington as the
"greater Middle East." In their 1995 book, Out of Afghanistan, based on
research in Soviet archives, foreign-policy analysts Diego Cordovez and
Selig Harrison provide a wide-ranging sense of just how so many of the
policies Kissinger put in place -- the empowerment of Iran, the restoration
of military relations with Pakistan, high oil prices, an embrace of Saudi
Wahhabism, and weapon sales -- came together to spark jihadism:
"It was in the early 1970s, with oil prices rising, that Shah Mohammed Reza
Pahlavi of Iran embarked on his ambitious effort to roll back Soviet
influence in neighboring countries and create a modern version of the
ancient Persian empire... Beginning in 1974, the Shah launched a determined
effort to draw Kabul into a Western-tilted, Tehran-centered regional
economic and security sphere embracing India, Pakistan and the Persian Gulf
states... The United States actively encouraged this roll-back policy as
part of its broad partnership with the Shah... SAVAK and the CIA worked hand
in hand, sometimes in loose collaboration with underground Afghani Islamic
fundamentalist groups that shared their anti-Soviet objectives but had their
own agendas as well... As oil profits sky-rocketed, emissaries from these
newly affluent Arab fundamentalist groups arrived on the Afghan scene with
bulging bankrolls."
Harrison also wrote that "SAVAK, the CIA, and Pakistani agents" were
involved in failed "fundamentalist coup attempts" in Afghanistan in 1973 and
1974, along with an attempted Islamic insurrection in the Panjshir Valley in
1975, laying the groundwork for the jihad of the 1980s (and beyond).
Much has been made of Jimmy Carter's decision, on the advice of National
Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski, to authorize "nonlethal" aid to the
Afghan mujahedeen in July 1979, six months before Moscow sent troops to
support the Afghan government in its fight against a spreading Islamic
insurgency. But lethal aid had already long been flowing to those jihadists
via Washington's ally Pakistan (and Iran until its revolution in 1979). This
provision of support to radical Islamists, initiated in Kissinger's tenure
and continuing through the years of Ronald Reagan's presidency, had a number
of unfortunate consequences known all too well today but seldom linked to
the good doctor. It put unsustainable pressure on Afghanistan's fragile
secular government. It laid the early infrastructure for today's
transnational radical Islam. And, of course, it destabilized Afghanistan and
so helped provoke the Soviet invasion.
Some still celebrate the decisions of Carter and Reagan for their role in
pulling Moscow into its own Vietnam-style quagmire and so hastening the
demise of the Soviet Union. "What is most important to the history of the
world?" Brzezinski infamously asked. "The Taliban or the collapse of the
Soviet empire? Some stirred-up Moslems or the liberation of Central Europe
and the end of the cold war?" (The rivalry between the two Harvard immigrant
diplomats, Kissinger and Brzezinski, is well known. But Brzezinski by 1979
was absolutely Kissingerian in his advice to Carter. In fact, a number of
Kissinger's allies who continued on in the Carter administration, including
Walter Slocombe and David Newsom, influenced the decision to support the
jihad.)
Moscow's occupation of Afghanistan would prove a disaster -- and not just
for the Soviet Union. When Soviet troops pulled out in 1989, they left
behind a shattered country and a shadowy network of insurgent
fundamentalists who, for years, had worked hand-in-glove with the CIA in the
Agency's longest covert operation, as well as the Saudis and the Pakistani
ISI. It was a distinctly Kissingerian line-up of forces.
Few serious scholars now believe that the Soviet Union would have proved any
more durable had it not invaded Afghanistan. Nor did the allegiance of
Afghanistan -- whether it tilted toward Washington, Moscow, or Tehran --
make any difference to the outcome of the Cold War, any more than did, say,
that of Cuba, Iraq, Angola, or Vietnam.
For all of the celebration of him as a "grand strategist," as someone who
constantly advises presidents to think of the future, to base their actions
today on where they want the country to be in five or 10 years' time,
Kissinger was absolutely blind to the fundamental feebleness and inevitable
collapse of the Soviet Union. None of it was necessary; none of the lives
Kissinger sacrificed in Cambodia, Laos, Angola, Mozambique, Chile,
Argentina, Uruguay, East Timor, and Bangladesh made one bit of difference in
the outcome of the Cold War.
Similarly, each of Kissinger's Middle East initiatives has been disastrous
in the long run. Just think about them from the vantage point of 2015:
banking on despots, inflating the Shah, providing massive amounts of aid to
security forces that tortured and terrorized democrats, pumping up the U.S.
defense industry with recycled petrodollars and so spurring a Middle East
arms race financed by high gas prices, emboldening Pakistan's intelligence
service, nurturing Islamic fundamentalism, playing Iran and the Kurds off
against Iraq, and then Iraq and Iran off against the Kurds, and committing
Washington to defending Israel's occupation of Arab lands.
Combined, they've helped bind the modern Middle East into a knot that even
Alexander's sword couldn't sever.
Bloody Inventions
Over the last decade, an avalanche of documents -- transcripts of
conversations and phone calls, declassified memos, and embassy cables --
have implicated Henry Kissinger in crimes in Bangladesh, Cambodia, southern
Africa, Laos, the Middle East, and Latin America. He's tried to defend
himself by arguing for context. "Just to take a sentence out of a telephone
conversation when you have 50 other conversations, it's just not the way to
analyze it," Kissinger said recently, after yet another damning tranche of
documents was declassified. "I've been telling people to read a month's
worth of conversations, so you know what else went on."
But a month's worth of conversations, or eight years for that matter, reads
like one of Shakespeare's bloodiest plays. Perhaps Macbeth, with its
description of what we today call blowback: "That we but teach bloody
instructions, which, being taught, return to plague the inventor."
We are still reaping the bloody returns of Kissinger's inventions.
Greg Grandin, a TomDispatch regular, teaches history at New York University.
He is the author of Fordlandia, The Empire of Necessity, which won the
Bancroft Prize in American history, and, most recently, Kissinger's Shadow:
The Long Reach of America's Most Controversial Statesman.
Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest
Dispatch Book, Nick Turse's Tomorrow's Battlefield: U.S. Proxy Wars and
Secret Ops in Africa, and Tom Engelhardt's latest book, Shadow Government:
Surveillance, Secret Wars, and a Global Security State in a
Single-Superpower World.
Copyright 2015 Greg Grandin
C 2015 TomDispatch. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/176049
Tomgram: Greg Grandin, Henry of Arabia
By Greg Grandin
Posted on September 27, 2015, Printed on September 27, 2015
http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/176049/
[Note to TomDispatch Readers: With today's tour de force (or do I mean, in
the grimmest sense, farce) of a piece on Henry Kissinger's "contribution" to
an increasingly chaotic world in the Greater Middle East, Greg Grandin
demonstrates the power also to be found in his new book, Kissinger's Shadow:
The Long Reach of America's Most Controversial Statesman. As I'm a great fan
of his writing, it's a pleasure to be able to offer TD readers a signed,
personalized copy of that book, which Mark Danner aptly calls "essential and
most timely," in return for a contribution of $100 (or more) to this
website. You get to reconsider Henry the K's world, which is also ours, and
TomDispatch gets another of the funding infusions that really do keep us
rolling along. Check out our donation page for the details, where, by the
way, David Vine's superb book on how we garrison the planet, Base Nation, is
also still available. Tom]
Why do I always seem to be writing about Henry Kissinger?
I once listened to the man who helped prolong the Vietnam War for half a
decade declare that its "tragedy" lay in the fact "that the faith of
Americans in each other became destroyed in the process." I later took to
the (web)pages of the New York Times to suggest that perhaps "the pain
endured by millions of survivors in Vietnam who lost family, the pain of
millions who were wounded, of millions who were killed, of millions driven
from their homes into slums and [refugee] camps reeking of squalor" was a
greater tragedy.
Then there was that book review for the Daily Beast on the forgotten
genocide in Bangladesh. Wouldn't you know that Kissinger was completely
wrapped up in it? He and his boss President Richard Nixon, in fact,
conspired to support "Pakistan's fiercely anti-communist Muslim military
ruler in the face of his 1971 mass murder of mostly Hindu Bengalis who were
seeking political autonomy and, ultimately, their own independent nation."
Frightening as it may seem, during this episode Nixon proved to be the voice
of reason as Kissinger apparently pushed to escalate the conflict into a
showdown with the Soviets.
Earlier this year, in the pages of The Nation, I found myself writing yet
again about the former national security adviser and secretary of state,
this time for his role in Rory Kennedy's Oscar-nominated documentary, Last
Days in Vietnam:
"Kissinger -- architect of the secret, murderous bombing of neighboring
Cambodia and top adviser to a president who resigned rather than face
impeachment -- is given carte blanche to craft his own self-serving version
of history and to champion another former boss, President Ford, as a
humanitarian."
Of course, Kissinger's name and handiwork also show up in my book on
American war crimes in Vietnam, Kill Anything That Moves. And here I am
again writing about the man, an activity that's starting to look almost
obsessive, so let me explain. One day in the early 2000s, I found myself on
a street in New York City watching as Kissinger was hustled away amid a sea
of roiling vitriol. "War criminal," shouted the protesters. "You've got
blood on your hands, Henry." It wasn't quite clear whose blood they were
referring to. It might have been that of Cambodians. Unless it was
Vietnamese. Or Laotians. Or Chileans. Or Bangladeshis. Or East Timorese.
From one corner of the world to another, Kissinger seems to have had a hand
in a remarkable number of untoward acts of state.
And as TomDispatch regular Greg Grandin suggests today, that's only the
beginning of a grim list of nations. Just as the United States was
extricating itself from its long debacle in Indochina, Grandin points out,
it was embarking on what would become another festering fiasco. If George W.
Bush blew a hole through the Greater Middle East, Henry Kissinger lit the
fuse. Today, we're still dealing with the hellacious fallout of Kissinger's
in-office foreign policy machinations and out-of-office wise-man advice as
the Greater Middle East hemorrhages lives and refugees.
This revelation and a raft of others figure in Grandin's latest book,
Kissinger's Shadow: The Long Reach of America's Most Controversial
Statesman, which paints a stunning portrait of that consummate political
chameleon and offers answers about how and why the world is so destabilized
and why so much of it can be traced, at least in part, to the United States
and its senior statesman, Henry the K. Andrew Bacevich calls Grandin's book
a "tour de force" and Publisher's Weekly says ardent Kissinger foes will be
"enthralled," so pick up a copy after you're done reading about the CEO
emeritus of Debacle, Inc. Nick Turse
Debacle, Inc.
How Henry Kissinger Helped Create Our "Proliferated" World
By Greg Grandin
The only person Henry Kissinger flattered more than President Richard Nixon
was Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the Shah of Iran. In the early 1970s, the Shah,
sitting atop an enormous reserve of increasingly expensive oil and a key
figure in Nixon and Kissinger's move into the Middle East, wanted to be
dealt with as a serious person. He expected his country to be treated with
the same respect Washington showed other key Cold War allies like West
Germany and Great Britain. As Nixon's national security adviser and, after
1973, secretary of state, Kissinger's job was to pump up the Shah, to make
him feel like he truly was the "king of kings."
Reading the diplomatic record, it's hard not to imagine his weariness as he
prepared for his sessions with the Shah, considering just what gestures and
words would be needed to make it clear that his majesty truly mattered to
Washington, that he was valued beyond compare. "Let's see," an aide who was
helping Kissinger get ready for one such meeting said, "the Shah will want
to talk about Pakistan, Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia, the Gulf, the Kurds, and
Brezhnev."
During another prep, Kissinger was told that "the Shah wants to ride in an
F-14." Silence ensued. Then Kissinger began to think aloud about how to
flatter the monarch into abandoning the idea. "We can say," he began, "that
if he has his heart set on it, okay, but the President would feel easier if
he didn't have that one worry in 10,000 [that the plane might crash]. The
Shah will be flattered." Once, Nixon asked Kissinger to book the entertainer
Danny Kaye for a private performance for the Shah and his wife.
The 92-year-old Kissinger has a long history of involvement in Iran and his
recent opposition to Barack Obama's Iran nuclear deal, while relatively
subdued by present Washington standards, matters. In it lies a certain
irony, given his own largely unexamined record in the region. Kissinger's
criticism has focused mostly on warning that the deal might provoke a
regional nuclear arms race as Sunni states led by Saudi Arabia line up
against Shia Iran. "We will live in a proliferated world," he said in
testimony before the Senate. In a Wall Street Journal op-ed co-authored with
another former secretary of state, George Shultz, Kissinger worried that, as
the region "trends toward sectarian upheaval" and "state collapse," the
"disequilibrium of power" might likely tilt toward Tehran.
Of all people, Kissinger knows well how easily the best laid plans can go
astray and careen toward disaster. The former diplomat is by no means solely
responsible for the mess that is today's Middle East. There is, of course,
George W. Bush's 2003 invasion of Iraq (which Kissinger supported). But he
does bear far more responsibility for our proliferated world's
disequilibrium of power than anyone usually recognizes.
Some of his Middle East policies are well known. In early 1974, for
instance, his so-called shuttle diplomacy helped deescalate the tensions
that had led to the previous year's Arab-Israeli War. At the same time,
however, it locked in Israel's veto over U.S. foreign policy for decades to
come. And in December 1975, wrongly believing that he had worked out a
lasting pro-American balance of power between Iran and Iraq, Kissinger
withdrew his previous support from the Kurds (whom he had been using as
agents of destabilization against Baghdad's Baathists). Iraq moved quickly
to launch an assault on the Kurds that killed thousands and then implemented
a program of ethnic cleansing, forcibly relocating Kurdish survivors and
moving Arabs into their homes. "Even in the context of covert action ours
was a cynical enterprise," noted a Congressional investigation into his
sacrifice of the Kurds.
Less well known is the way in which Kissinger's policies toward Iran and
Saudi Arabia accelerated the radicalization in the region, how step by
catastrophic step he laid the groundwork for the region's spiraling crises
of the present moment.
Guardian of the Gulf
Most critical histories of U.S. involvement in Iran rightly began with the
joint British-U.S. coup against democratically elected Prime Minister
Mohammad Mosaddegh in 1953, which installed Pahlavi on the Peacock Throne.
But it was Kissinger who, in 1972, greatly deepened the relationship between
Washington and Tehran. He was the one who began a policy of unconditional
support for the Shah as a way to steady American power in the Persian Gulf
while the U.S. extracted itself from Southeast Asia. As James Schlesinger,
who served as Nixon's CIA director and secretary of defense, noted, if "we
were going to make the Shah the Guardian of the Gulf, we've got to give him
what he needs." Which, Schlesinger added, really meant "giving him what he
wants."
What the Shah wanted most of all were weapons of every variety -- and
American military trainers, and a navy, and an air force. It was Kissinger
who overrode State Department and Pentagon objections and gave the Shah what
no other country had: the ability to buy anything he wanted from U.S.
weapons makers.
"We are looking for a navy," the Shah told Kissinger in 1973, "we have a
large shopping list." And so Kissinger let him buy a navy.
By 1976, Kissinger's last full year in office, Iran had become the largest
purchaser of American weaponry and housed the largest contingent of U.S.
military advisors anywhere on the planet. By 1977, the historian Ervand
Abrahamian notes, "the shah had the largest navy in the Persian Gulf, the
largest air force in Western Asia, and the fifth-largest army in the whole
world." That meant, just to begin a list, thousands of modern tanks,
hundreds of helicopters, F-4 and F-5 fighter jets, dozens of hovercraft,
long-range artillery pieces, and Maverick missiles. The next year, the Shah
bought another $12 billion worth of equipment.
After Kissinger left office, the special relationship he had worked so hard
to establish blew up with the Iranian Revolution of 1979, the flight of the
Shah, the coming to power of Ayatollah Khomeini, and the taking of the U.S.
Embassy in Tehran (and its occupants as hostages) by student protesters.
Washington's political class is still trying to dig itself out of the
rubble. A number of high-ranking Middle East policymakers and experts held
Kissinger directly responsible for the disaster, especially career diplomat
George Ball, who called Kissinger's Iran policy an "act of folly."
Kissinger is deft at deflecting attention from this history. After a speech
at Annapolis in 2007, a cadet wanted to know why he had sold weapons to the
Shah of Iran when "he knew the nature of his regime?"
http://www.amazon.com/dp/1627794492/ref=nosim/?tag=tomdispatch-20
http://www.amazon.com/dp/1627794492/ref=nosim/?tag=tomdispatch-20"Every
American government from the 1950s on cooperated with the Shah of Iran,"
Kissinger answered. He continued: "Iran is a crucial piece of strategic real
estate, and the fact that it is now in adversarial hands shows why we
cooperated with the Shah of Iran. Why did we sell weapons to him? Because he
was willing to defend himself and because his defense was in our interest.
And again, I simply don't understand why we have to apologize for defending
the American national interest, which was also in the national interest of
that region."
This account carefully omits his role in greatly escalating the support
provided to the Shah, including to his infamous SAVAK torturers -- the
agents of his murderous, U.S.-trained secret police-cum-death-squad -- who
upheld his regime. Each maimed body or disappeared family member was one
more klick on the road to revolution. As George Ball's biographer, James
Bill, writes: considering the "manifest failure" of Kissinger's Iran policy,
"it is worthy of note that in his two massive volumes of political memoirs
totalling twenty-eight-hundred pages, Kissinger devoted less than twenty
pages to the Iranian revolution and U.S.-Iran relations."
After the Shah fell, the ayatollahs were the beneficiaries of Kissinger's
arms largess, inheriting billions of dollars of warships, tanks, fighter
jets, guns, and other materiel. It was also Kissinger who successfully urged
the Carter administration to grant the Shah asylum in the United States,
which hastened the deterioration of relations between Tehran and Washington,
precipitating the embassy hostage crisis.
Then, in 1980, Saddam Hussein's Iraq invaded Iran, beginning a war that
consumed hundreds of thousands of lives. The administration of Ronald Reagan
"tilted" toward Baghdad, providing battlefield intelligence used to launch
lethal sarin gas attacks on Iranian troops. At the same time, the White
House illegally and infamously trafficked high-tech weaponry to
revolutionary Iran as part of what became the Iran-Contra affair.
"It's a pity they can't both lose," Kissinger is reported to have said of
Iran and Iraq. Although that quotation is hard to confirm, Raymond Tanter,
who served on the National Security Council, reports that, at a
foreign-policy briefing for Republican presidential nominee Ronald Reagan in
October 1980, Kissinger suggested "the continuation of fighting between Iran
and Iraq was in the American interest." Having bet (and lost) on the Shah,
Kissinger now hoped to make the best of a bad war. The U.S., he counselled
Reagan, "should capitalize on continuing hostilities."
Saudi Arabia and the Petrodollar Fix
Kissinger's other "guardian" of the Gulf, Sunni Saudi Arabia, however,
didn't fall and he did everything he could to turn that already close
relationship into an ironclad alliance. In 1975, he signaled what was to
come by working out an arms deal for the Saudi regime similar to the one he
had green-lighted for Tehran, including a $750 million contract for the sale
of 60 F-5E/F fighters to the sheiks. By this time, the U.S. already had more
than a trillion dollars' worth of military agreements with Riyadh. Only Iran
had more.
Like Tehran, Riyadh paid for this flood of weaponry with the proceeds from
rising oil prices. The word "petrodollar," according to the Los Angeles
Times, was coined in late 1973, and introduced into English by New York
investment bankers who were courting the oil-producing countries of the
Middle East. Soon enough, as that paper wrote, the petrodollar had become
part of "the world's macroeconomic interface" and crucial to Kissinger's
developing Middle Eastern policy.
By June 1974, Treasury Secretary George Shultz was already suggesting that
rising oil prices could result in a "highly advantageous mutual bargain"
between the U.S. and petroleum-producing countries in the Middle East. Such
a "bargain," as others then began to argue, might solve a number of
problems, creating demand for the U.S. dollar, injecting needed money into a
flagging defense industry hard hit by the Vietnam wind-down, and using
petrodollars to cover mounting trade deficits.
As it happened, petrodollars would prove anything but a quick fix. High
energy prices were a drag on the U.S. economy, with inflation and high
interest rates remaining a problem for nearly a decade. Nor was petrodollar
dependence part of any preconceived Kissingerian "plan." As with far more of
his moves than he or his admirers now care to admit, he more or less
stumbled into it. This was why, in periodic frustration, he occasionally
daydreamed about simply seizing the oil fields of the Arabian peninsula and
doing away with all the developing economic troubles.
"Can't we overthrow one of the sheikhs just to show that we can do it?" he
wondered in November 1973, fantasizing about which gas-pump country he could
knock off. "How about Abu Dhabi?" he later asked. (Imagine what the world
would be like today had Kissinger, in the fall of 1973, moved to overthrow
the Saudi regime rather than Chile's democratically elected president,
Salvador Allende.) "Let's work out a plan for grabbing some Middle East oil
if we want," Kissinger said.
Such scimitar rattling was, however, pure posturing. Not only did Kissinger
broker the various deals that got the U.S. hooked on recycled Saudi
petrodollars, he also began to promote the idea of an "oil floor price"
below which the cost per barrel wouldn't fall. Among other things, this
scheme was meant to protect the Saudis (and Iran, until 1979) from a sudden
drop in demand and provide U.S. petroleum corporations with guaranteed
profit margins.
Stephen Walt, a scholar of international relations, writes: "By the end of
1975, more than six thousand Americans were engaged in military-related
activities in Saudi Arabia. Saudi arms purchased for the period 1974-1975
totaled over $3.8 billion, and a bewildering array of training missions and
construction projects worth over $10 billion were now underway."
Since the 1970s, one administration after another has found the iron-clad
alliance Kissinger deepened between the House of Saud's medieval "moderates"
and Washington indispensable not only to keep the oil flowing but as a
balance against Shia radicalism and secular nationalism of every sort.
Recently, however, a series of world-historical events has shattered the
context in which that alliance seemed to make sense. These include: the
catastrophic war on and occupation of Iraq, the Arab Spring, the Syrian
uprising and ensuing civil war, the rise of ISIS, Israel's rightwing lurch,
the conflict in Yemen, the falling price of petroleum, and, now, Obama's
Iran deal.
But the arms spigot that Kissinger turned on still remains wide open.
According to the New York Times, "Saudi Arabia spent more than $80 billion
on weaponry last year -- the most ever, and more than either France or
Britain -- and has become the world's fourth-largest defense market." Just
as they did after the Vietnam drawdown, U.S. weapons manufacturing are
compensating for limits on the defense budget at home by selling arms to
Gulf states. The "proxy wars in the Middle East could last for years," write
Mark Mazzetti and Helene Cooper of the New York Times, "which will make
countries in the region even more eager for the F-35 fighter jet, considered
to be the jewel of America's future arsenal of weapons. The plane, the
world's most expensive weapons project, has stealth capabilities and has
been marketed heavily to European and Asian allies. It has not yet been
peddled to Arab allies because of concerns about preserving Israel's
military edge."
If fortune is really shining on Lockheed and Boeing, Kissinger's prediction
that Obama's de-escalation of tensions with Tehran will sooner or later
prompt Saudi-Iranian hostilities will pan out. "With the balance of power in
the Middle East in flux, several defense analysts said that could change.
Russia is a major arms supplier to Iran, and a decision by President
Vladimir Putin to sell an advanced air defense system to Iran could increase
demand for the F-35, which is likely to have the ability to penetrate
Russian-made defenses," the Times reports.
"This could be the precipitating event: the emerging Sunni-Shia civil war
coupled with the sale of advanced Russian air defense systems to Iran," said
one defense analyst. "If anything is going to result in F-35 clearance to
the gulf states, this is the combination of events.'"
Into Afghanistan
If all Henry Kissinger contributed to the Middle East were a regional arms
race, petrodollar addiction, Iranian radicalization, and the Tehran-Riyadh
conflict, it would be bad enough. His legacy, however, is far worse than
that: he has to answer for his role in the rise of political Islam.
In July 1973, after a coup in Afghanistan brought to power a moderate,
secular, but Soviet-leaning republican government, the Shah, then
approaching the height of his influence with Kissinger, pressed his
advantage. He asked for even more military assistance. Now, he said, he
"must cover the East with fighter aircraft." Kissinger complied.
Tehran also began to meddle in Afghan politics, offering Kabul billions of
dollars for development and security, in exchange for loosening "its ties
with the Soviet Union." This might have seemed a reasonably peaceful way to
increase U.S. influence via Iran over Kabul. It was, however, paired with an
explosive initiative: via SAVAK, the Shah's secret police, and Pakistan's
Inter-Services Intelligence agency (ISI), extremist Islamic insurgents were
to be slipped into Afghanistan to destabilize Kabul's republican government.
Kissinger, who knew his British and his Russian imperial history, had long
considered Pakistan of strategic importance. "The defense of Afghanistan,"
he wrote in 1955, "depends on the strength of Pakistan." But before he could
put Pakistan into play against the Soviets in Afghanistan, he had to perfume
away the stink of genocide. In 1971, that country had launched a bloodbath
in East Pakistan (now Bangladesh), with Nixon and Kissinger standing
"stoutly behind Pakistan's generals, supporting the murderous regime at many
of the most crucial moments," as Gary Bass has detailed. The president and
his national security adviser, Bass writes, "vigorously supported the
killers and tormentors of a generation of Bangladeshis."
Because of that genocidal campaign, the State Department, acting against
Kissinger's wishes, had cut off military aid to the country in 1971, though
Nixon and Kissinger kept it flowing covertly via Iran. In 1975, Kissinger
vigorously pushed for its full, formal restoration, even as he was offering
his tacit approval to Maoist China to back Pakistan whose leaders had their
own reasons for wanting to destabilize Afghanistan, having to do with border
disputes and the ongoing rivalry with India.
Kissinger helped make that possible, in part by the key role he played in
building up Pakistan as part of a regional strategy in which Iran and Saudi
Arabia were similarly deputized to do his dirty work. When Pakistani Prime
Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, who had backed the 1971 rampage in East
Pakistan, visited Washington in 1975 to make the case for restoration of
military aid, Kissinger assured President Gerald Ford that he "was great in
'71." Ford agreed, and U.S. dollars soon started to flow directly to the
Pakistani army and intelligence service.
As national security adviser and then secretary of state, Kissinger was
directly involved in planning and executing covert actions in such diverse
places as Cambodia, Angola, and Chile. No available information indicates
that he ever directly encouraged Pakistan's ISI or Iran's SAVAK to
destabilize Afghanistan. But we don't need a smoking gun to appreciate the
larger context and consequences of his many regional initiatives in what, in
the twenty-first century, would come to be known in Washington as the
"greater Middle East." In their 1995 book, Out of Afghanistan, based on
research in Soviet archives, foreign-policy analysts Diego Cordovez and
Selig Harrison provide a wide-ranging sense of just how so many of the
policies Kissinger put in place -- the empowerment of Iran, the restoration
of military relations with Pakistan, high oil prices, an embrace of Saudi
Wahhabism, and weapon sales -- came together to spark jihadism:
"It was in the early 1970s, with oil prices rising, that Shah Mohammed Reza
Pahlavi of Iran embarked on his ambitious effort to roll back Soviet
influence in neighboring countries and create a modern version of the
ancient Persian empire... Beginning in 1974, the Shah launched a determined
effort to draw Kabul into a Western-tilted, Tehran-centered regional
economic and security sphere embracing India, Pakistan and the Persian Gulf
states... The United States actively encouraged this roll-back policy as
part of its broad partnership with the Shah... SAVAK and the CIA worked hand
in hand, sometimes in loose collaboration with underground Afghani Islamic
fundamentalist groups that shared their anti-Soviet objectives but had their
own agendas as well... As oil profits sky-rocketed, emissaries from these
newly affluent Arab fundamentalist groups arrived on the Afghan scene with
bulging bankrolls."
Harrison also wrote that "SAVAK, the CIA, and Pakistani agents" were
involved in failed "fundamentalist coup attempts" in Afghanistan in 1973 and
1974, along with an attempted Islamic insurrection in the Panjshir Valley in
1975, laying the groundwork for the jihad of the 1980s (and beyond).
Much has been made of Jimmy Carter's decision, on the advice of National
Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski, to authorize "nonlethal" aid to the
Afghan mujahedeen in July 1979, six months before Moscow sent troops to
support the Afghan government in its fight against a spreading Islamic
insurgency. But lethal aid had already long been flowing to those jihadists
via Washington's ally Pakistan (and Iran until its revolution in 1979). This
provision of support to radical Islamists, initiated in Kissinger's tenure
and continuing through the years of Ronald Reagan's presidency, had a number
of unfortunate consequences known all too well today but seldom linked to
the good doctor. It put unsustainable pressure on Afghanistan's fragile
secular government. It laid the early infrastructure for today's
transnational radical Islam. And, of course, it destabilized Afghanistan and
so helped provoke the Soviet invasion.
Some still celebrate the decisions of Carter and Reagan for their role in
pulling Moscow into its own Vietnam-style quagmire and so hastening the
demise of the Soviet Union. "What is most important to the history of the
world?" Brzezinski infamously asked. "The Taliban or the collapse of the
Soviet empire? Some stirred-up Moslems or the liberation of Central Europe
and the end of the cold war?" (The rivalry between the two Harvard immigrant
diplomats, Kissinger and Brzezinski, is well known. But Brzezinski by 1979
was absolutely Kissingerian in his advice to Carter. In fact, a number of
Kissinger's allies who continued on in the Carter administration, including
Walter Slocombe and David Newsom, influenced the decision to support the
jihad.)
Moscow's occupation of Afghanistan would prove a disaster -- and not just
for the Soviet Union. When Soviet troops pulled out in 1989, they left
behind a shattered country and a shadowy network of insurgent
fundamentalists who, for years, had worked hand-in-glove with the CIA in the
Agency's longest covert operation, as well as the Saudis and the Pakistani
ISI. It was a distinctly Kissingerian line-up of forces.
Few serious scholars now believe that the Soviet Union would have proved any
more durable had it not invaded Afghanistan. Nor did the allegiance of
Afghanistan -- whether it tilted toward Washington, Moscow, or Tehran --
make any difference to the outcome of the Cold War, any more than did, say,
that of Cuba, Iraq, Angola, or Vietnam.
For all of the celebration of him as a "grand strategist," as someone who
constantly advises presidents to think of the future, to base their actions
today on where they want the country to be in five or 10 years' time,
Kissinger was absolutely blind to the fundamental feebleness and inevitable
collapse of the Soviet Union. None of it was necessary; none of the lives
Kissinger sacrificed in Cambodia, Laos, Angola, Mozambique, Chile,
Argentina, Uruguay, East Timor, and Bangladesh made one bit of difference in
the outcome of the Cold War.
Similarly, each of Kissinger's Middle East initiatives has been disastrous
in the long run. Just think about them from the vantage point of 2015:
banking on despots, inflating the Shah, providing massive amounts of aid to
security forces that tortured and terrorized democrats, pumping up the U.S.
defense industry with recycled petrodollars and so spurring a Middle East
arms race financed by high gas prices, emboldening Pakistan's intelligence
service, nurturing Islamic fundamentalism, playing Iran and the Kurds off
against Iraq, and then Iraq and Iran off against the Kurds, and committing
Washington to defending Israel's occupation of Arab lands.
Combined, they've helped bind the modern Middle East into a knot that even
Alexander's sword couldn't sever.
Bloody Inventions
Over the last decade, an avalanche of documents -- transcripts of
conversations and phone calls, declassified memos, and embassy cables --
have implicated Henry Kissinger in crimes in Bangladesh, Cambodia, southern
Africa, Laos, the Middle East, and Latin America. He's tried to defend
himself by arguing for context. "Just to take a sentence out of a telephone
conversation when you have 50 other conversations, it's just not the way to
analyze it," Kissinger said recently, after yet another damning tranche of
documents was declassified. "I've been telling people to read a month's
worth of conversations, so you know what else went on."
But a month's worth of conversations, or eight years for that matter, reads
like one of Shakespeare's bloodiest plays. Perhaps Macbeth, with its
description of what we today call blowback: "That we but teach bloody
instructions, which, being taught, return to plague the inventor."
We are still reaping the bloody returns of Kissinger's inventions.
Greg Grandin, a TomDispatch regular, teaches history at New York University.
He is the author of Fordlandia, The Empire of Necessity, which won the
Bancroft Prize in American history, and, most recently, Kissinger's Shadow:
The Long Reach of America's Most Controversial Statesman.
Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest
Dispatch Book, Nick Turse's Tomorrow's Battlefield: U.S. Proxy Wars and
Secret Ops in Africa, and Tom Engelhardt's latest book, Shadow Government:
Surveillance, Secret Wars, and a Global Security State in a
Single-Superpower World.
Copyright 2015 Greg Grandin
C 2015 TomDispatch. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/176049
