Kissinger of Death

The Bush administration, the families of the victims of 9/11, Congressional and Senate leaders have come together to form a September 11 Commission which is to investigate not only how such an event can be prevented but why it happened.

The investigation can go wherever it may lead: it could be about US foreign policy and the efficiency of institutions like the FBI and CIA, immigration controls and so on.

It’s a commission for security, to figure out how Americans can be made safer. The person appointed head of this commission by President Bush is Henry Kissinger.

Bush may as well have chosen Osama bin Laden to head the commission.

These are the days of reading the ’A’ section of the New York Times, and I see more people are wrinkling their brows over it at cafes and subways than at any time I remember in New York. The A section of the New York Times is world news, news of global importance.

Most mornings I read the ‘A’ section of the New York Times at the Victory Café on the corner of State Street and Hoyt in downtown Brooklyn. I am very nervous reading it. I may seem like an old man mumbling as I read, but I am talking back to the paper.

Learning from the newspaper today what I didn’t know: that US troops are based in the horn of Africa, that Qatar is where the headquarters are being prepared for the US campaign against Iraq, that troops are being sent to the Phillippines, does not make me feel secure.

Then I read about Henry Kissinger’s appointment as chairman of the 9/11 commission. In the front page photograph I look at his hair, he has all of it, and he still has that dour expression. His eyes seem more baleful, as if he is seeing death, not causing death as he used to but seeing it come for him (he is 79 years old). At least I hope it’s coming for him, and that he does not cause any more.

The Bush administration says he brings a great sense of history. God help the world if Kissinger brings more continuity to a history he has helped create.

Some of that history is the prolonging of the Vietnam War, its expansion into Cambodia and the secret bombing of Cambodia, and the ouster and assassination of the democratically elected Allende of Chile.

Does Kissinger have a sense of the future? In 10 years he will be dead, or certainly too old to go to the bathroom by himself. Why is someone whose future is gravely foreshadowed given a responsibility that is all about the future? Such a man will do only what it takes to show that he was right all along.

I am suspicious about old men, they have no interest in burying hatchets, but in sharpening old ones and passing them along to the young.

The New York Times editorial described Kissinger as possessing a vast intellect.

This is the man who was a member and intellectual of the Washington establishment that came up with potent ideas like the domino theory. After South Vietnam Red China was going to go for Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia. The American had to stop them in Vietnam.

Kissinger is very well known for having argued that US interest is a reason in and of itself. It has nothing to do with moral consideration.

Today, how is Osama any different than Henry?

The choice of Kissinger for the commission also shows that Washington thinks it never did wrong. There are no regrets.

There is another man in the news in the New York Times whose morality is the opposite of Kissinger and Bin Laden. It is Einstein, and he is in the news in New York because of the 100 year anniversary of his theory of relativity.

Einstein publicly regretted that his ideas led to nuclear bombs and the American bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I wonder if that means that he dreaded he had the idea itself. It’s a powerful and enduring moment of conscience.

These days Osama and Kissinger represent a general theory of violence: death and power squared. Who will show another set of equations?