The Chris Moeller Archives

Their blood on his hands

"The attack of bombardment, by whatever means, of towns, villages, dwellings or buildings, which are undefended is prohibited," - The Hague Convention, Article 25, October 18, 1907


Henry Kissinger has donated the majority of his professional papers to Yale University, but when he speaks on campus, the school has to avoid publicizing the appearance. It seems that most people of conscience and basic decency consider Kissinger to be a manifestation of evil, a remorseless war criminal and mass murderer that nevertheless hob knobs with Billy Crystal in luxury boxes at Yankee Stadium.

He is a man who ordered the dropping of 3.7 million tons of bombs on Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia between 1969 and 1973, almost twice the amount that had been dropped by all militaries combined during World War II. The civilians he dropped them on were peaceful rice-farmers that possessed no clue who it was that was bombing them or why it was happening. They could not see the B-52 bombers that were doing the dropping. They simply dug holes in the ground and tried to survive. They were not “collateral damage” (ugh, to even use that heinous expression in quotes makes me physically recoil), but rather the targets. The U.S. military had evidence that there were no military installations anywhere nearby. He plainly considered these people to be of no particular consequence. To Henry Kissinger, they were like to ants or cockroaches.

And he didn’t even order these atrocities for the glamorous goal of world domination, as Adolf Hitler did. He launched his “Final Solution” because he was a careerist. He didn’t want his boss to "lose" Indochina. He did it illegally, and in violation of the global rules of war conduct quoted above designed to protect civilians, rules that he believed—and still believes—don’t apply to him. He did it in violation of the United States Constitution. He bothered to notify neither the Congress nor the American public of the heaviest aerial bombing campaign in human history, and then engaged in a wide-ranging cover-up of the fact of extensive civilian casualties. According to his logic of his actions, burning Laotian peasants alive with napalm would somehow force the Berlin Wall to crumble.

Henry Kissinger won a Noble Peace Prize in 1973, which is the equivalent of Nathan Bedford Forrest winning the NAACP’s Hall of Fame Award. It’s hard to know which is worse—the Nobel committee giving Kissinger the award, or having now had more than 40 years to take it away and failing to do so. When once asked about the penitent bombing confessions of his State Department predecessor, Robert McNamara, he said, pretending to cry and rubbing his eyes, “Boohoo, boohoo… he’s still beating his breast, right? Still feeling guilty?” To state the obvious, the standards of the Nobel committee were relaxed some time ago, long before the presidency of Barack Obama. Des Moines newspaper columnist Donald Kaul once suggested that the prize for world peace simply be awarded to the guy who was “a really lousy shot.”

There will be sadness one day soon in Kissinger’s death. Sadness in that it appears the death won’t occur in a dank, dark prison with the man’s legs and arms shackled to a wall that’s been decorated with the images of the innocent men, women, and children he mutilated and massacred, the people he killed for the apparent sole purpose of having a “reputable” newspaper like the Washington Post continue to publish his editorials on U.S. foreign policy-- even in areas of global conflict of which he knows nothing-- well into his golden years.

If Henry Kissinger shows up at a Washington dinner party you're attending, do his victims the slightest courtesy of excusing yourself.

posted by CM @ 7:13 PM