Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – Henry Kissinger’s death at 100 is an opportunity to consider the ways in which his lawlessness helped undermine International Humanitarian Law, the laws of war that responsible leaders attempted to erect to prevent the horrors of WW II from recurring. In his single-minded calculation of supposed “national” interest, which he imagined as identical to the interests of the rich, he was entirely willing to mow down innocent noncombatants in the hundreds of thousands. There is a direct line from his advocacy of carpet-bombing Southeast Asian villagers to the Israeli carpet-bombing of Gaza, which resumed early Friday morning.
Documents released by the Bill Clinton administration showed that in the first half of 1973, Kissinger and Nixon had more bomb tonnage dropped on Cambodia than was dropped by the Allies during all of World War II.
The US war on the Viet Cong led Washington to attempt to cut off their supply lines, which zigged and zagged over the borders colonial powers had drawn on Southeast Asia, in and out of Cambodia. In a fruitless bid to cut off those supplies, the US began bombing Cambodia in the 1960s, but the intensity of this bombardment increased over time.
The renewed 1969-1973 bombing campaign was Kissinger’s idea, “Operation Breakfast.” Sophal Ear writes, “The diary entry of Richard Nixon’s chief of staff, H. R. Haldeman, reads [on March 17, 1969]: ‘ … Historic day. K[issinger]‘s “Operation Breakfast” finally came off at 2:00 pm our time. K really excited, as is P[resident].” The following day, Haldeman wrote: ‘K’s “Operation Breakfast” a great success. He came beaming in with the report, very productive.'”
What kind of genocidal psychopath “beams” at beginning the illegal bombing of a country with which the US was not even at war?
By early 1973 Kissinger’s bright idea had already so disrupted Cambodian lives that disgruntled peasants there turned to the Communists, the Khmer Rouge. Kissinger and Nixon ordered even more bombing as the Communists approached the capital, Phnom Penh.
Embed from Getty Images
Victim of U.S. Bombing Error. Phnom Penh: Wearing head bandage, this young Cambodian youngster is one of some 300 casualties of bombing error on Neak Luong by U.S. warplanes August 6. He and other victims are awaiting transportation to hospital after having been brought here by Navy boats August 7.Getty Images/ Bettman
So Washington upped the ante. Taylor Owen and Ben Kiernan reported that in February through August of 1973, “2,756,941 tons’ worth [of bombs were] dropped in 230,516 sorties on 113,716 sites. Just over 10 percent of this bombing was indiscriminate, with 3,580 of the sites listed as having “unknown” targets and another 8,238 sites having no target listed at all.” To repeat, in all of World War II the Allies dropped 2,000,000 tons of bombs, including the nuclear warheads at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The authors conclude that Cambodia may have been the most bombed country in world history.
Owen and Kiernan imply that hundreds of thousands of Cambodians died in this carpet bombing. Cambodia only had a population of 6.7 million then, so half a million dead, which is a plausible estimate, would be over 7% of the entire population. That would be like killing 16 million Americans.
While they say that 10% of the targeted sites were indiscriminate, the fact is that bombing populous villages from 30,000 feet is always indiscriminate. Most of the hundreds of thousands dead were certainly innocent noncombatants, a concept Kissinger never understood; or in a darker reading perhaps he understood it and had contempt for it. Responding to the repeated nuking of islands in Micronesia in above ground tests, Kissinger said, “There are only 90,000 of them out there. Who gives a damn?”
Anthony Bourdain, the great traveler and food enthusiast, wrote in his 2001 memoir, “Once you’ve been to Cambodia, you’ll never stop wanting to beat Henry Kissinger to death with your bare hands. You will never again be able to open a newspaper and read about that treacherous, prevaricating, murderous scumbag sitting down for a nice chat with Charlie Rose or attending some black-tie affair for a new glossy magazine without choking. Witness what Henry did in Cambodia — the fruits of his genius for statesmanship — and you will never understand why he’s not sitting in the dock at The Hague next to Milosevic.”
The Netanyahu government’s carpet-bombing of Gaza is a direct descendant of Kissinger’s Operation Breakfast.
“Gaza Guernica 1.1,” by Juan Cole, Digital, Dream/IbisPaint, 2023.
Yuval Abraham of +972 Mag writes, “The Israeli army’s expanded authorization for bombing non-military targets, the loosening of constraints regarding expected civilian casualties, and the use of an artificial intelligence system to generate more potential targets than ever before, appear to have contributed to the destructive nature of the initial stages of Israel’s current war on the Gaza Strip.”
It is estimated that the Israeli Air Force massacred 15,000 Palestinians in Gaza from the air, very few of them combatants.
Abraham underlines, “the army significantly expand[ed] its bombing of targets that are not distinctly military in nature. These include private residences as well as public buildings, infrastructure, and high-rise blocks, which sources say the army defines as “power targets” (‘matarot otzem’).”
Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s mealy-mouthed assertion that Israeli “precision munitions” can kill Hamas without killing large numbers of innocent civilians is mere Israeli propaganda. The precision munitions were set to kill large numbers of noncombatants in a total war of the Kissingerian sort. As Israeli targeting of the Palestinians (it is not a war, since the latter have no heavy weapons or air force) resumes, so will the high body counts, assuming the Netanyahu government permits enough societal organization to survive to permit the counting.
Reuters: “LIVE: View over Israel-Gaza border”
Kissinger’s butchering of villagers from the air threw Cambodia into such volatile political turbulence that a genocide resulted in which 20% of the population was killed, littering the country with sun-drenched white skeletons.
The Communists defeated him in Vietnam, where they still rule as preparations are made for Kissinger’s burial. The Lao People’s Revolutionary Party rules Laos. The Cambodian People’s Party, with roots in Communism, rules Cambodia, though it has turned to supporting a mixed economy model.
I don’t predict any sort of victory or longevity for Hamas itself, but it is clear from this history that you can’t use air power to destroy radical movements with genuine grassroots. Palestinians if anything will come out of the carpet-bombing (and the even more deadly denial of potable water and sufficient food) more radicalized than ever. They will still be on Israel’s doorstep even if they can be crowded into south Gaza as the maniacal Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant diabolically plans.
Kissinger rose to positions of power where he could overrule what he thought of as the soft and namby-pamby laws of war enacted in 1945 and after. Despite being a refugee from the Holocaust, he never escaped his formation in a Central European tradition of elite and profoundly amoral statecraft in the service of an unbridled nationalism and for the purposes of the super-rich in their white tuxedos.
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