“I was very flattered when Henry Kissinger said I ran the State Department better than anybody had run it in a long time.” – Hillary Clinton
Let’s consider some of Kissinger’s achievements during his tenure as Richard Nixon’s top foreign policy–maker.
(1) prolonged the Vietnam War for five pointless years;
(2) illegally bombed Cambodia and Laos;
(3) goaded Nixon to wiretap staffers and journalists;
(4) bore responsibility for three genocides in Cambodia, East Timor, and Bangladesh;
(5) urged Nixon to go after Daniel Ellsberg for having released the Pentagon Papers, which set off a chain of events that brought down the Nixon White House;
(6) pumped up Pakistan’s ISI, and encouraged it to use political Islam to destabilize Afghanistan;
(7) began the US’s arms-for-petrodollars dependency with Saudi Arabia and pre-revolutionary Iran;
(9) supported coups and death squads throughout Latin America; and
(10) ingratiated himself with the first-generation neocons, such as Dick Cheney and Paul Wolfowitz, who would take American militarism to its next calamitous level.
Warning: Explicit Language