Yes, that's right. Henry Kissinger turns 100 this weekend. He has lived an elite, high-profile life of exclusive social events, dating Hollywood starlets, and receiving prestigious awards, including the Nobel Peace Prize in 1973 and the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1977. And while he is known for leading the Paris peace talks that ended the Vietnam War, he has a much darker reputation--"Dark Brandon"-- that has been ignored in the last half century since the end of America's most unpopular and controversial war. The
Intercept has posted a series of articles concerning his role in Nixon's secret war in Cambodia. Newly released archive documents show a monstrous bombing campaign on a neutral nation that killed upwards of 150,000 civilian Cambodians living along the Vietnam-Cambodian border
[map], a figure much higher than previously reported. Kissinger himself admitted to only 50,000 civilian casualties during the campaign. The US flew over 230,000 sorties over Southeast Asia. Besides killing innocents in great numbers, the secret campaign did not succeed in suppressing communist insurgency. The Khmer Rouge grew from a small force of fewer than 10,000 in 1969 to over 200,000 troops and militia in 1973 using the bombing campaign as recruiting propaganda.
Nixon came to power promising to end the war in Vietnam. But in December 1970 he expanded it by attacking Cambodian border areas
[map], allegedly in pursuit of the NVA and Viet Cong seeking sanctuary in the neighboring country. He called Kissinger in a rage demanding, "everything that can fly to go in and crack the hell out of them". Minutes later National Security Advisor Kissinger was on the phone with his military aide, General Haig, relaying the order for attack. Planning for a military campaign had begun two years earlier, just one month after Nixon took office. Kissinger has never been held to account for his participation in what Christopher Hitchens labeled in his book, "The Trial of Henry Kissinger", war crimes. In 2002 an Australian human rights activist attempted to secure an arrest warrant from a British court in 2002 under the Geneva Convention of 1957. Slobodan Milosevic, the former Yugoslav President, was on trial for war crimes. The court refused to issue a warrant citing insufficient evidence. Kissenger has enjoyed imputinty for his actions for five decades. The bombing of civilians by the American military can be traced from the Cambodian campaign to the later warfare in Lybia, Somalia, Yemen and Afghanistan. [
Peter Sellers as "Dr. Strangelove"]
The new evidence shows villagers in the boarder zone were intensely bombed and strafed by US aircraft, sometimes everyday. One survivor recalls that a US helicopter gunship attacked unarmed farmers working in the rice fields. Surviving military records of the various operations in the border zone are sparse; the military campaign was a secret operation to avoid adverse US public reaction. Some records were falsified to maintain secrecy. American planes taking off on missions to bomb South Vietnam were rerouted in midair to their real targets in Cambodia. Records were altered to show that the sites authorized to be bombed actually were bombed, while evidence of the real bombing runs was destroyed. General Creighton W. Abrams, commander of US forces in Vietnam at that time, told Congress that a furnace dedicated to the destruction of this evidence “burned probably 12 hours a day.” One operation is prominent for its brutality: Operation Menu, B-52 bombing runs against the border region. Another survivor recalls a B-52 strike on the village of Por in which "everything was destroyed". He lost 17 members of his family in the air raid. In the village of Mroan half the residents, about 250 people, were wiped out. Kissenger approved each one of the 3,875 sorties in a region he told an inquiring journalist was "essentially unpopulated". There are more harrowing examples of the human devastation caused by US bombing raids and ground incursions in the
Intercept post. In January 1971 Congress passed the Cooper-Church amendment outlawing US ground operations in Cambodia, but US military incursions did not stop. The Nixon administration lied about their military activity.
Kissenger did all of this for a man he did not respect, and for a cause he thought was lost after his first visit to Vietnam. He declared after his political mentor Nelson Rockefeller lost the nomination that, "Nixon is not fit to be President". Yet he persisted in his support of Nixon's policies of an 'honorable end' to the war that prolonged it and killed millions. His rationale was apparently that US prestige and power wouild suffer irreparable damage if it simply withdrew from the conflict. An interesting footnote to history is that Hillary Clinton wrote in her review of Kissinger's book, "World Order", that she considers him a friend.
