How Henry Kissinger created a world of bad guys Armed to the Teeth

[unhappycamper]

http://www.juancole.com/2015/09/kissinger-created-armed.html

How Henry Kissinger created a world of bad guys Armed to the Teeth
By contributors | Sep. 28, 2015
By Greg Grandin | ( Tomdispatch.com)

The only person Henry Kissinger flattered more than President Richard Nixon was Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the Shah of Iran. In the early 1970s, the Shah, sitting atop an enormous reserve of increasingly expensive oil and a key figure in Nixon and Kissinger’s move into the Middle East, wanted to be dealt with as a serious person. He expected his country to be treated with the same respect Washington showed other key Cold War allies like West Germany and Great Britain. As Nixon’s national security adviser and, after 1973, secretary of state, Kissinger’s job was to pump up the Shah, to make him feel like he truly was the “king of kings.”

Reading the diplomatic record, it’s hard not to imagine his weariness as he prepared for his sessions with the Shah, considering just what gestures and words would be needed to make it clear that his majesty truly mattered to Washington, that he was valued beyond compare. “Let’s see,” an aide who was helping Kissinger get ready for one such meeting said, “the Shah will want to talk about Pakistan, Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia, the Gulf, the Kurds, and Brezhnev.”

~snip~

The 92-year-old Kissinger has a long history of involvement in Iran and his recent opposition to Barack Obama’s Iran nuclear deal, while relatively subdued by present Washington standards, matters. In it lies a certain irony, given his own largely unexamined record in the region. Kissinger’s criticism has focused mostly on warning that the deal might provoke a regional nuclear arms race as Sunni states led by Saudi Arabia line up against Shia Iran. “We will live in a proliferated world,” he said in testimony before the Senate. In a Wall Street Journal op-ed co-authored with another former secretary of state, George Shultz, Kissinger worried that, as the region “trends toward sectarian upheaval” and “state collapse,” the “disequilibrium of power” might likely tilt toward Tehran.

Of all people, Kissinger knows well how easily the best laid plans can go astray and careen toward disaster. The former diplomat is by no means solely responsible for the mess that is today’s Middle East. There is, of course, George W. Bush’s 2003 invasion of Iraq (which Kissinger supported). But he does bear far more responsibility for our proliferated world’s disequilibrium of power than anyone usually recognizes.

[orpupilofnature57]

1. How prophetic Ike's warning was, a Boys Club maneuvered by guy's like Dr Strangelove, just another

misanthrope .

[monmouth4]

2. And there he was at St. Patrick's getting a papal blessing. He sickens me...n/t

[leveymg]

3. Dr. K left a blood stain behind on that pew.

And, his many acolytes still in government are just so many drops leading out the door and in every direction.

[1norcal]

4. Thanks for the reminder...

Thanks for keeping this in front of us it is important to understand how we got into our current fix in the mideast and also world wide. It is distressing how background "intellectuals" like Henry Kissinger and Zbigniew Brzezinski have positioned America as the most disliked country on earth... International chess my tail.

[MisterP]

5. best and brightest and wise men: their anticommunism ranged the entire spectrum,

with heavy influence even from "CIA socialists": that's what makes it even more dangerous than if it were a bunch of Birchers and proud neonazis (and even just that's how we got both crack and 9-11)

Nam was largely in the name of preserving liberal democracy against Stalinism: it sounds like a carefully-messaged lie but many advisors and generals believed that's what they were fighting for--and that's what makes liberal interventionism so dangerous, because of how it misperceives the world and starts as well as allows wars

this is how we attacked two dictatorships (which we'd used as proxies) and created a certain little group called IS

[bemildred]

6. I remember reading in the 70s an article about Henry K.,

going on about how power was the best aphrodisiac ...

It still makes me ill to think about it.