November 5, 2006
Kissinger and Iraq Posted by Fredric Smoler at 05:15 PM EST Josh Zeitz wrote about Kissinger the other day, noting that “Kissinger’s Ph.D. dissertation, A World Restored: Metternich, Castlereagh, and the Problems of Peace 1812-22, celebrated the Austrian diplomat Klemens Wenzel von Metternich’s role at the Congress of Vienna, which saw the major European monarchies reimpose stability on the continent at the cost of stifling national and liberal forces unleashed by the French revolution.” Josh added that if rumors are correct, “Kissinger is counseling the current President to bide his time before slicing Iraq into three national regions and declaring victory. Order restored, but hardly according to Metternich’s model.” You could make a case for the contrary, that if the rumor is correct, Kissinger is again urging the restoration of order on the Metternich model. The principle of majority rule, which would mean a Shiite-dominated Iraq, would be abandoned. Metternich didn’t have much regard for majority rule. The liberal forces that would be crushed—that are already being crushed—by Shiite and Sunni Islamists would be abandoned to their fates. Not un-Metternichean. Creating three states, one Kurdish, one Shiite Arab, and one Sunni Arab, may look like anti-Metternichean ethnic (or confessional) self-determination, but it would not be done out of any anti-Metternichean conviction about the right to self-determination. It would be done, as Josh suggests, so that Bush could declare victory and abandon the Iraqis to their fate. That is what Kissinger is accused of having done in Indochina. From imagining the perspective of the people left to their fate—the ones exterminated in Cambodia, or imprisoned in smaller prison camps or one country-sized prison camp in Vietnam—one obtains a darker view of Kissinger than the one taken by the newest celebrants of his “realism.” If this “realism” is Kissinger’s advice, and it carries the day, the ethnic cleansing that will follow in places like Kirkuk, let alone Baghdad, may not produce killing and torment on the Indochinese scale, but that outcome is not impossible, and it will likely produce killing and torment on a massive scale. That may come in any event, but if it is done as a result of a policy authored by Kissinger, one can trust it will be done with few tears from its instigator. Kissinger was always stoical in the face of other people’s tragedies. My memory of A World Restored—it may be shaky, as I haven’t taught that book since 1987—is that Kissinger praised Metternich for trying to rehabilitate France to balance the rising power of Russia, with the implication that the United States was wise to do the same with Germany after 1945. There is no precise parallel in Iraq. You could argue that a Metternichean strategy would be to rehabilitate the Iraqi Sunni Arabs to balance Iran, and that is in fact what the first Bush tried in 1991 and what the “realists” proposed in 2003: Give Iraq to another Sunni tyrant, one less unreliable than Saddam Hussein. This remains odd advice for a number of reasons, chief among them being that the U.S. can balance Iran on our own, if we have the will to do so, and if we do not have the will to do so, a restored Iraqi Sunni tyrant is not going to have the means. Josh quotes, without assessing the remark, a New Republic writer’s certainty that by August 1972 Kissinger knew that Vietnam was “a lost cause.” This implies both that South Vietnam was a lost cause and that Kissinger knew it, and I am not sure of either of those things, although Kissinger’s belief to that effect does seem likely; middle-period Kissinger occasionally gloried in Spenglerian gloom. One of the maddest things about the Iraq war is the attempted partial rehabilitation of Henry Kissinger, by both conservatives and liberals. Kissinger was a man who combined amazing cynicism with a record of pretty consistent failure, and whose crimes purchased no victories, or at least not ones he intended. He is a strange hero for the right, and a stranger one for the left.
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