Missing Henry Kissinger

Kissinger is finally gone – having lived to an amazing, hale and hearty 100 in defiance of such hysterical, unbridled hatred from both Right and Left that Donald Trump himself might have envied. He died on November 29 last year. And already we should miss him more than ever,

For it was Kissinger, using the old fashioned much despised diplomatic methods of bribery, threats, lies, flattery, pressure, bullying and deception who brought half a century of peace – more or (increasingly) less to the Middle East when he shuttled the region endlessly as US secretary of state from 1973 to 1975.

He was direct. He could be coarse. When he wanted to be, he was fearful. He paralyzed Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin with his shouting, bullying and very real threats.

Rabin literally disintegrated. He withdrew into an alcohol-fueled nervous breakdown, just as he had done before the 1967 Six Day War. On that earlier occasion, it was Generals Moshe Dayan and Ezer Weizmann who took up the crucial leadership positions of de facto supreme command and saved the state. In 1975, it was Foreign Minister Yigal Allon who stepped in to deal with Henry and cut the crucial deal with Damascus.

I was out there at the time, just starting out on my own life’s path of following in the footsteps of the Great and Far From Good. And there must be almost no eyewitnesses left in the news, history and diplomacy businesses who can say that they were. 

Kissinger was routinely reviled and sneered at the time – Liberal and leftist American pundits poured on him hysterical hatreds that should have had them strapped down and force-fed lithium in padded cells. Such people literally foamed at the mouth with hatred for the arch-cynic and diplomatic manipulator. On the far right, the reaction was equally crazed. 

Today, it is fashionable and has been for the past couple of generations to see Kissinger as the ultimate Protocol of Elders of Zion favorite wet dream – a diabolical Jew sacrificing the world for the Greater Good of Israel. At the time and for decades after, the Jewish neocons of Washington screamed at him for betraying the Jewish state, being a self-hating Jew because he was a patriotic American and making another Holocaust inevitable.

But the false prophets lied through their teeth as usual. The catastrophe now facing Israel by contrast is a direct result of them seizing power and influence and abandoning Kissinger’s cautious, incremental and ultimately moderate policies to manage the world and prevent it exploding.

Today, looking at the weak, inept, useless farce that our current woeful joke of a secretary of state Antony Blinken has made of US power, prestige and policy across the Middle East, it is extremely useful to look back at what Kissinger did – and did not do – half a century ago to bring genuine peace while he was being reviled by Know Nothing Idiots on every side as an Evil Warmonger.

First, Kissinger actually went there. A lot. He invented a technique no one had ever dreamed of before: He became a workaholic secretary of state shuttling between Cairo, Jerusalem and Damascus. He never let up. He kept the personal and emotional pressure on everyone. And he did it for months on end.

Second, Kissinger turned the cliches of diplomacy on their head. He was not soft-spoken, quiet, gentle and tactful. That is always the specialty of the worthless, contemptible losers: The worms like Anthony Eden, Cyrus Vance, Warren Christopher and of course the ineffable Blinken because they have no guts – do not know how to threaten or leverage the power of their great nations.

What a contrast to James A. Baker, a former US combat Marine in the Korean War who told Tariq Aziz, the foreign minister of Iraq in 1990 in Geneva that if he and his boss Saddam Hussein ever dared to use poison gas against US troops in the inevitable looming war to liberate Kuwait – they would be nuked.

Baker meant it and Tariq Aziz knew he meant it. And so did Saddam – always a coward under his worthless skin. And sure enough, none of Saddam’s beloved poison gas which had been freely sprayed on the people of Iraq was ever used on US troops.

Does anyone believe for a nanosecond that Blinken is capable of making such a threat. Or that anyone would believe such a risible bluster if he ever did?

So successful was Kissinger’s impact. And so overwhelming was the force of his personality and charismatic example that for the next quarter century, even the most dim and somnolent secretaries of state like Cyrus Vance and Warren Christopher were able to magnify their hardly impressive (indeed almost indiscernible) brains and character by following Henry’s example.

When shuttle diplomacy was, indeed carried out by forceful, able diplomats on top of their game like secretaries of state George Schultz and James A. Baker, or even by Presidents Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton themselves – the results again were immediate, positive and dramatic.

But it took a secretary of state who cared, a secretary of state ready to work hard and sacrifice their personal convenience in order to actually get the job done to achieve such results. None of those qualities ever existed in Madeleine Albright

Burn Proof among mindless feminists because she was the first female secretary of state, she scrapped the idea of hands-on shuttle diplomacy leaving Benjamin Netanyahu and Yasser Arafat free to deadlock the admittedly always badly flawed Oslo Peace Process and let the Israeli-Palestinian conflict deteriorate down to its next explosion in the fearful Second Intifada from 2001 to 2006.

So Middle East shuttle diplomacy died around a quarter century ago and has since been forgotten. It is of course beneath Antony Blinken’s ludicrous conception of his own nonexistent dignity that he should ever get his hands dirty and submit himself to the hardships of the perfectly comfortable air-conditioned hotels of Damascus, Jerusalem and Cairo.

Yet as President Joe Biden and his soft-spoken always polite nonentity of a secretary of state stumble on in dim and unaware ineptitude to the Abyss of Armageddon – that long shadow of a thermonuclear world war that really would End Everything, would the bullying, tantrums, barefaced lies and endless negotiating sessions of Henry Kissinger be such a terrible, unthinkable price to pay in order to avoid it?