Henry Kissinger

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Some dare call it

Conspiracy

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Secrets revealed!
The revealers
Power is the ultimate aphrodisiac.
—Henry Kissinger
Yeah, School of the Americas? I'd like to order two Latin American dictators, five death squads and a Cherry Coke.

Henry "The Wanderer"[1] Kissinger (born 1923) was the National Security Advisor and later Secretary of State under US presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford. He is most famous for engineering campaigns that massively screwed over numerous Third World countries. (We're talking about millions of deaths here.) Hitch called him a war criminal.[2]

Very Serious People, who tend to consider his shenanigans in Southeast Asia features rather than bugs, remember his tenure most fondly.[3]

Contents

[edit] Foreign policy screw-jobs

The illegal we do immediately; the unconstitutional takes a little longer.[4]

[edit] The good

  • Helped Tricky Dick open relations with China and begin detente policies such as SALT.
  • Took part in the negotiations to end the 1973 Yom Kippur War.
  • Criticized wingnuts who still want to blow the hell out of Russia.[5]
  • Had military experience, so avoids the chickenhawk label.
  • Found Tricky Dick's idea of hitting North Vietnam with nukes to be "too much."

[edit] The ugly

  • One of the architects of the secret bombing campaign in Cambodia, which played an important role in bringing the Khmer Rouge to power as an unintended side-effect. After the US racked up an additional 40,000+ casualties in Cambodia, Kissinger entered into ceasefire negotiations with Le Duc Tho of North Vietnam. He was awarded the Nobel Irony Peace Prize for this. It has since been widely considered a joke.
  • Maintained economic and military aid to Pakistan as it indiscriminately massacred over a million civilians during the Bangladesh Liberation War. Called Indira Gandhi a "bitch" while he did so.[6]
  • Dramatically increased aid and military funds into Indonesia in support of Suharto's brutal dictatorship, which killed up between 90,000 and 200,000 unarmed civilians in East Timor.
  • In accordance with his policy of "Madman Theory," on October 27th, 1969, as part of Operation "Giant Lance," had Nixon send 18 B-52 bomber planes armed with nuclear warheads to the eastern soviet border, in the hopes that the soviets would panic and pressure North Vietnam to accept US peace demands at the treaty of Paris.[7] Whether this is truly "ugly" or not depends on one's faith in game theory, but it at least deserves a spot on this list.
  • Supported Operation Condor, a campaign designed to synchronize the secret police of the fascist dictators in South America and support coups and drug dealing in the region. Kissinger was particularly fond of Chile's glorious dictator Augusto Pinochet and Jorge Rafael Videla's junta in Argentina.
  • Wanted to "smash Cuba" in 1976, because that worked well before.[8]
  • Was involved in Watergate.[9] Couldn't even escape that.
  • Buddied up with Dubya to dispense advice on Iraq.

[edit] Madman Theory

As mentioned above, Kissinger was the architect of "Madman Theory," the doctrine that sought to discard traditional game theory based assumptions about the actions and possible retaliation of the USSR during the cold war by casting US president Richard Nixon as a short-tempered, irrational man with such an obsession with communism that he would threaten his own nation's existence simply to get rid of it.[10] This was based off of Eisenhower's previous doctrine of "massive retaliation," in which he hoped to deter aggression by showing the Soviet Union that America was capable of responding with force overwhelming enough to protect it and its allies.

Nixon liked the idea, and even encouraged Kissinger to present him as a "madman" whenever Vietnam came up in diplomatic talks, and that he should "shake his head and say, 'I am sorry, Mr. Ambassador, but [the president] is out of control." He also told Haldmen that "I want the North Vietnamese to believe that I've reached the point that I might do anything to stop the war. We'll just slip the word to them that for God's sake, you know Nixon is obsessed about Communism. We can't restrain him when he is angry — and he has his hand on the nuclear button' — and Ho Chi Minh himself will be in Paris in two days begging for peace."[11]

[edit] Conspiracy theories

Kissinger is a conspiracy theorist's wet dream for the fact that he is:

Thus, he often has a supporting, if not starring, role in all sorts of international Jewish conspiracy, New World Order, and Illuminati theories. Among the more anti-Semitic Truthers, he is claimed to have played a major role in a Shrub whitewash as he briefly[12] held a seat on an investigation panel for 9/11. There was long a notion that the Kisser might be the Antichrist himself, but he's a bit old for that position now.

Oh, and he's appeared in TV commercials. Sinister. Though lately he's having trouble preventing Stephen Colbert from breaking into his office.[13]

[edit] See also

[edit] External Links

[edit] Footnotes

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