How To Win Friends While Killing People September 11, 2008
Posted by bensix in Uncategorized.trackback
Henry Kissinger muses on McCain:
““When I was in Vietnam for negotiations on implementing the Paris Agreement, the North Vietnamese prime minister had a dinner—I was leaving the next day—and he said if I wanted to take McCain on my flight, it could be arranged,” he said. “I told him that I won’t take McCain or anyone else on my plane. The prisoner release would have to happen on a schedule previously agreed. Somehow McCain heard about this and months later, at the White House reception for returned prisoners, he said to me, ‘I want to thank you for saving my honor.’ What McCain did not tell me at that time was that he had refused to be released two years earlier unless all were released with him. It was better for him to remain in jail in order to preserve his honor and American honor than to come home on my plane.”“
By a happy coincidence, the National Security Archive has just released a series of transcripts that document telephone conversations between Kissinger, Nixon and CIA Director Richard Helms as they consider the coup that removed Chile’s elected President and brought the dicator and murderer Pinochet to power.
“We will not let Chile go down the drain,” Kissinger is quoted as saying.
A few months ago, Matt Kennard, a student of journalism at Columbia University, wrote a fascinating article that compared the Campus reaction to visits from Kissinger and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. The latter was rightly condemned, but the former received “a warm and effusive welcome…as he answered questions about his experience at the hub of the United States“.
The difference, I think, is in the semantics. Ahmadinejad is a scruffily sinister dictator, oppressing within the boundaries of the state, while Kissinger was a slick coordinater of international affairs, with tactics that were “controversial” rather than murderous.
That may be why one is threatened with war and the other advises the Republican Presidential candidate and uses words like “honour” without the world laughing at him/vomiting copiously.
Or it could be that one wears a tie and the other doesn’t. I mean, when you’re in the business of international diplomacy, that’s just asking for it.
Heh, good point. Kissinger, bizarrely enough, was seen as a bit of a playboy.
Ben
[...] cretin, how dare you lecture the world on “dangerous dictators” and then praise that vile war criminal (okay, okay, I’m aware that that’s hardly surprising in America but let me have my fun). [...]