Maybe I’ve been engaging in unsuspected age-ism all along? I just kind of assumed that everyone else regarded 83-year-old Henry Kissinger, as I did, as an out-of-it, barely articulate old guy whose days of exercizing any real power or influence were long behind him.
So Bob Woodward is now here, in the first exceprt of his new book to be carried by the WaPo (Sunday), telling me that I under-estimated Kissinger’s role completely:
- A powerful, largely invisible influence on Bush’s Iraq policy was former secretary of state Kissinger.
“Of the outside people that I talk to in this job,” Vice President Cheney told me in the summer of 2005, “I probably talk to Henry Kissinger more than I talk to anybody else. He just comes by and, I guess at least once a month, Scooter [his then-chief of staff, I. Lewis Libby] and I sit down with him.”
The president also met privately with Kissinger every couple of months, making him the most regular and frequent outside adviser to Bush on foreign affairs.
Kissinger sensed wobbliness everywhere on Iraq, and he increasingly saw it through the prism of the Vietnam War. For Kissinger, the overriding lesson of Vietnam is to stick it out.
In his writing, speeches and private comments, Kissinger claimed that the United States had essentially won the war in 1972, only to lose it because of the weakened resolve of the public and Congress.
In a column in The Washington Post on Aug. 12, 2005, titled “Lessons for an Exit Strategy,” Kissinger wrote, “Victory over the insurgency is the only meaningful exit strategy.”
He delivered the same message directly to Bush, Cheney and Hadley at the White House.
Victory had to be the goal, he told all. Don’t let it happen again. Don’t give an inch, or else the media, the Congress and the American culture of avoiding hardship will walk you back.
He also said that the eventual outcome in Iraq was more important than Vietnam had been. A radical Islamic or Taliban-style government in Iraq would be a model that could challenge the internal stability of the key countries in the Middle East and elsewhere.
Kissinger told Rice that in Vietnam they didn’t have the time, focus, energy or support at home to get the politics in place. That’s why it had collapsed like a house of cards. He urged that the Bush administration get the politics right, both in Iraq and on the home front. Partially withdrawing troops had its own dangers. Even entertaining the idea of withdrawing any troops could create momentum for an exit that was less than victory.
In a meeting with presidential speechwriter Michael Gerson in early September 2005, Kissinger was more explicit: Bush needed to resist the pressure to withdraw American troops. He repeated his axiom that the only meaningful exit strategy was victory.
“The president can’t be talking about troop reductions as a centerpiece,” Kissinger said. “You may want to reduce troops,” but troop reduction should not be the objective. “This is not where you put the emphasis.”
To emphasize his point, he gave Gerson a copy of a memo he had written to President Richard M. Nixon, dated Sept. 10, 1969.
“Withdrawal of U.S. troops will become like salted peanuts to the American public; the more U.S. troops come home, the more will be demanded,” he wrote.
The policy of “Vietnamization,” turning the fight over to the South Vietnamese military, Kissinger wrote, might increase pressure to end the war because the American public wanted a quick resolution. Troop withdrawals would only encourage the enemy. “It will become harder and harder to maintain the morale of those who remain, not to speak of their mothers.”
Two months after Gerson’s meeting, the administration issued a 35-page “National Strategy for Victory in Iraq.” It was right out of the Kissinger playbook. The only meaningful exit strategy would be victory.
There is a little bit in this excerpt about the infighting among top Bush advisors that was featured in the NYT stories about the book Friday and Saturday.
The other notable thing in the WaPo excerpt was the account of a meeting this past March between Centcom commander Jean Abizaid and the courageous Rep. John Murtha, who’s been calling openly for a quick withdrawal from Iraq.
Woodward wrote:
- Abizaid was in Washington to testify before the Senate Armed Services Committee. He painted a careful but upbeat picture of the situation in Iraq.
Afterward, he went over to see Rep. John P. Murtha…
“The war in Iraq is not going as advertised,” Murtha had said. “It is a flawed policy wrapped in illusion.”
Now, sitting at the round dark-wood table in the congressman’s office, Abizaid, the one uniformed military commander who had been intimately involved in Iraq from the beginning and who was still at it, indicated he wanted to speak frankly. According to Murtha, Abizaid raised his hand for emphasis, held his thumb and forefinger a quarter of an inch from each other and said, “We’re that far apart.”
Woodie doesn’t tell us, of course, what Abizaid plans to do about that…
Anyway, those are the best bits so far.
Who is in control in US?
Is it “Laura and Barney” !!
Helena.
barely articulate old guy whose days of exercizing any real power or influence were long behind him.
“George W. Bush has named Henry Kissinger to head a supposedly independent commission to investigate the nightmarish attacks of September 11, 2001, a commission intended to tell the public what went wrong on and before that day.”
Yes, I see that Herr Domino Theorist has returned to profer some more “strategic introductions” to our deadbeat dictator, Deputy Dubya Bush. Influence peddling by any other name would stink as foul. As a victim/veteran of the Nixon-Kissinger Fig Leaf Contingent (Vietnam 1970-1972) I have this to say about the rabid old Rasputin and his bumpkin boy retard, the current President of the United States:
“Rasputin and the Retard”
We hear that Henry Kissinger
Has come around once more,
His battered ego trailing in
The dirt upon the floor
To offer for a princely sum
The counsel of a whore
This ruined and discredited
Rasputin on the take
Has smelled an opportunity
To sell some snake oil fake
To lordly swine who rightly fear
Due justice at the stake
He’s found in Bush a kindred soul:
A poodle-screwing fool
As desperate a demagogue
Who ever dropped a stool
Into his drooping diapers as
He broke the Golden Rule
His own dead reputation he
Can not resuscitate
And so he seeks in George the Worst
A Prussian monarch mate
A bomber just like him with whom
He can commiserate
A tyro Torquemada who
Finds torture to his taste
Demanding dispensation for
Decisions made in haste
Like launching warfare unrefined
That he had never faced
To re-fight Vietnam and “win”
A “victory” at last
This vain and vicious Visigoth
Would have George bomb and blast
Another pipsqueak country like
He did back in the past
George asked us to go shopping while
He tapped the Nation’s till
He told us not to worry, now
He says we must keep still
While he continues messing up
And sending us the bill
He says that if we do not stay
The “terrorists” will “win”
The bottom of the garbage pit
That he has dumped us in
Where now our troops must fight and die
As cover for his sin
But Henry the Hysterical
Still counsels Bomb and Bash
Like George he says to “stay the curse”
While pilfering our stash
They took off by themselves but want
Us with them when they crash
“We cannot lose our will,” they say,
When we balk and refuse
Yet shopping on our credit cards
Has robbed them of their ruse
We have no will invested thus
We have no will to lose
But anyway they pass the buck
It all comes back to him
Who blew the nation’s wad on war
And did it on a whim
Who marketed a pack of lies
To sell his purpose dim
The bubbles in the nation’s blood
Begin to pop and fizz
Responsibility abounds
Just never any his
An expectation set so low
That nothing lower is
Michael Murry, “The Misfortune Teller,” Copyright 2006
Grrrrrr.
For Kissinger, the overriding lesson of Vietnam is to stick it out.
Looking at the facts, the overriding lesson of Vietnam is that the US paid no price for getting out. There were no serious adverse consequences for the US other than a momentary humiliation.
Wow, Michael! Thanks so much!
Mr. Kissinger wrote a book about another diplomat who refused to “give an inch”, Prince von Metternich. While the Prince, if known at all, is known for his diplomacy, his slavish adherence to old forms of government, in his case, the dying Monarchies of Europe is the association by which I prefer to remember him.
How funny to see a disciple of his follow the same tactic of working to prop up what I see as a dying form of government, faux democracy, or the rule of a deliberately misinformed populace.
all these guys think that they can control how things go on the ground by acting like they are winning. like if cheney says “the insurgency is in it’s last throes” it will realy happen.
“jennifer lopez will fall in love with me”
also, woodward creeps me out. he seems like a guy who has a lot of money and thinks he’s a pretty big deal. plus, there are lots of books about iraq that come out like every week. why the hype over this one?
Again, as a victim/veteran of the Nixon-Kissinger Fig Leaf Contingent (Vietnam 1970-1972) I can say authoritatively that Henry Kissinger did not have then, nor has he now, any realistic knowledge of collapsing conditions in the puppet colonial constabulary du jour. “Yellowing the Corpses” Vietnamization did not appeal to the Vietnamese any more the “Browning the Bodies” Iraqification appeals to the Iraqis. And referring to American service men and women as “salted peanuts” only compounds the disdain we should all feel for this withered and long-discredited influence peddler.
Furthermore, Americans must seriously discount Kissinger’s pathetic faith that the leaders and citizens of other countries see the Lunatic Leviathan (i.e., Kissinger’s bloody, bungling America) through the same wrong end of the monarchial Prussian binoculars he uses to keep constantly in view the ludicrous legend in his own mind. Everyone seems to understand Americans but the Americans: not a deep ocean, but rather a shallow, babbling brook.
I have always thought that George W. Bush’s whimsical, reckless blundering into Iraq looked like Vietnam on steroids; and now it seems only too apparent why: Henry Kissinger meeting secretly with “five deferment” Dick Cheney in some undisclosed bunker crypt once a month — without the cleansing light of day to disinfect the delusional seance. Talk about the bland leading the blind!
Stay the Curse, indeed.
If i hadn’t been so tired last night, what I’d have focused on as well was the lying disingenuousness of what Vice was saying there: “I probably talk to Henry Kissinger more than I talk to anybody else. He just comes by and, I guess at least once a month, Scooter and I sit down with him.”
He “just comes by”, indeed! Like some dear old neighbor pausing at the fence as he walks his dog…. But of course that’s not how a Vice-President operates: he’d have had to set up a schedule. Vice would really have had to want to see the guy.
Plus, of course, The president also met privately with Kissinger every couple of months… But it was probably the meetings with Vice that were more important.
Is it telling also the Vice have no work to do just hide when the president there the rulls of hiding should be applicable to all “friends and non-friends”
Or the double of the President have no work to do just hankering around in the offices somewhere.
Being Dick Cheney
What’s Vice President Dick Cheney REALLY Doing When He’s At His “Undisclosed Location”?
MADKANE:Speaking of spirit, Mr. Bush portrays himself as a very spiritual man, and is viewed by some people as the new leader of the Christian right, now that Pat Robertson’s no longer President of the Christian Coalition. Isn’t that ironic in light of Mr. Bush’s … uhhh …. history?
CHENEY: Irony died on 9/11.
MADKANE: Yes, so I’ve heard. Do you think 9/11 could have been prevented?
CHENEY: No. 9/11 occurs every year.
MADKANE: That’s very amusing, but it’s not what I meant.
CHENEY: Language precision is essential in an interviewer.
MADKANE: What about in a President?
CHENEY: I’m afraid I must go. The President’s on the phone. so busy guy I wonder if the President have call him during those visits by Kissinger?
MADKANE: Thanks for your time, Mr. Vice President. I hope to interview you again soon.
CHENEY: My cave door is always open.
I just kind of assumed that everyone else regarded 83-year-old Henry Kissinger, as I did, as an out-of-it, barely articulate old guy whose days of exercizing any real power or influence were long behind him.
Always nice to see a mature, well-reasoned response.
Mr. Woodward’s book, he said, raised the question of “why didn’t Condi Rice and George Tenet tell the 9/11 commission about that? They were obliged to do that and they didn’t.”
He is quoted as saying, “The only thing we didn’t do was pull the trigger to the gun we were holding to her head. ” Mr. Black did not return calls left at the security firm Blackwater, which he joined last year.
The book says that Mr. Tenet hurriedly organized the meeting — calling ahead from his car as it traveled to the White House — because he wanted to “shake Rice” into persuading the president to respond to dire intelligence warnings that summer about a terrorist strike. Mr. Woodward writes that Mr. Tenet left the meeting frustrated because “they were not getting through to Rice.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/01/washington/01cnd-book.html?ex=1317355200&en=beb29e8f20ad8f76&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss
BTW, J. Cofer Black is vice chairman of Blackwater USA security firm, currently doing a great business in Iraq.