"Military intervention, humanitarian or strategic, has two prerequisites: First, a consensus on governance after the overthrow of the status quo is critical. If the objective is confined to deposing a specific ruler, a new civil war could follow in the resulting vacuum, as armed groups contest the succession, and outside countries choose different sides. Second, the political objective must be explicit and achievable in a domestically sustainable time period. I doubt that the Syrian issue meets these tests. We cannot afford to be driven from expedient to expedient into undefined military involvement in a conflict taking on an increasingly sectarian character. In reacting to one human tragedy, we must be careful not to facilitate another."
This was written by the same man who advised President Nixon, when Israel was struggling against Egypt and Syria during the War of Atonement, to withhold supplies. Although the Arabs had been supplied with the latest Soviet weaponry, Kissinger reportedly told Nixon, "Let them [the Israelis] bleed a little."
This was written by the same man who also informed Nixon (see: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/11/us/politics/11nixon.html):
"The emigration of Jews from the Soviet Union is not an objective of American foreign policy. And if they put Jews into gas chambers in the Soviet Union, it is not an American concern. Maybe a humanitarian concern."
Maybe a "humanitarian concern"? Humanitarian concerns should not shape foreign policy? Every sinew in my body rebels against this noxious declaration.
Well, the likelihood is indeed that when Assad is ultimately deposed, Syria's Sunnis, some 70 percent of the population, will be seeking revenge against Assad's Alawaite minority. And I hope at that time the world will do all in its power to protect innocents.
But just in case my soft-hearted pleas for mercy don't resonate with Heinz, perhaps he should reconsider the vast stockpiles of chemical weapons that Assad has accumulated, and in whose hands this arsenal might ultimately find itself when Assad falls.
Then, too, there is the "minor" issue of containing Iranian attempts at establishing hegemony over the Muslim Middle East. There is a reason why Iranian paliament speaker Ali Larijani recently threatened that intervention in Syria, Tehran's closest ally, "would definitely envelop the Zionist regime" (http://www.mehrnews.com/en/newsdetail.aspx?NewsID=1616460).
Why can't Kissinger do the world a favor and acknowledge that his policies, demonstrably wrong even in his heyday, are irrelevant, and that his attempts to regain the limelight, evidencing a narcissism undiminished with the years, are unwanted.
"Heinz Kissinger, a refugee from Nazi Germany"
ReplyDeleteHe wasn't alone. Two third of German Jews emigrated. Most of them were not Jews in any sense, including education, received more often than not in Catholic schools. There was 50% of intermarriage among German Jews. Sadly, German Jews contributed to the Holocaust... and then left. Although there were genuine victims (not surprisingly usually the least assimilated, those who were the least close to sharing the Nazi ideology), many didn't have losses in the immediate family, or even substantial economic losses and benefited greatly (after some inconvenience of adjustment) from emigration, unlike millions of decent, genuine human beings in other countries who didn't have a chance.
Sadly, AFTER the Holocaust many (not all) kept their anti-Jewish beliefs and cultivated what they shared, yes, with the Nazis. No, they didn't undergo denazification.
A non-Jewish friend, a historian, once described with a disgust a prominent Columbia U. art historian who in the 1980s (!!!, yes, after the Holocaust) was ranting on PBS about badness of Yiddish, Talmud and East European Jews. They've done it for two hundred years.