BOOKS AND ARTS

two complementary essays, he looks at Indians from Oaxaca. In one, he tells how tens of thousands now live, obsessed by basketball, in Los Angeles; in another, he shows how Indian community organisation is slowly transforming for the better the lives of tomato pickers on commercial farms at San Quintin in Baja California.

Mr Quinones has a keen eye and ear for Mexico's changing popular culture: one of his essays concerns the life and early death of Chalino Sanchez, a toneless singer of maracorridas, or ballads, chronicling the exploits of drug traffickers who span the northern border. In a corner of Michoacan state, the author comes across a gang of crack and substance users who call themselves West Side Kansas Street. But Mr Quinones also shows how familiarity with a freer society across the border contributed to destroying the tolerance of ordinary Mexicans for the PRI. He has a fine understanding of how the PRI managed to survive for so long by buying loyalty through a myriad of small deals, but how it also trapped Mexico in an inert and mediocre bureaucratic culture.

It is Mr Quinones's contention that there is "another Mexico", which is "not always pretty" but is vital, dynamic and self-reliant, and "is often found on the country's margins". It is that Mexico which took many academics and armchair pundits by surprise, and finally booted out the PRI in last year's presidential election. Its winner, Mr Fox, is a candid, individualistic politician of immigrant roots, and a former manager of Coca-Cola in Mexico. That makes him, as Ms Guillermoprieto notes, "the unlikeliest, least tip iceo president Mexicans could have chosen". Both these books help to explain why Mr Fox won, and in doing so they shed light on deeper changes in Latin America.

Washington vendettas

Oh, Henry

THE TRIAL OF HENRY KISSINGER. By Christopher Hitchens. Verso; 172 pages; $22 and £15

IN OFFICE, Henry Kissinger often remarked that even paranoiacs had real enemies. However, it is doubtful that he envisioned Christopher Hitchens. Mr Hitchens asserts in this short squib that he felt compelled to omit a great deal of creditable material and confined himself "to the identifiable crimes that should be placed on a proper bill of indictment". Actually, he passes along any odour he thinks he has sniffed.

Mr Hitchens's first sentence contains his only understatement, an acknowledgment that he is "a political opponent" of the former secretary of state. He concludes by de-

scribing Mr Kissinger as a "deceitful and honourless toad", a phrase that captures his polemical and relentless assault on all of Mr Kissinger's attributes, from his "rather gross" manners to his alleged war crimes. It is hard to take seriously a book which asserts that "the single greatest achievement" of a man who counts the Nobel peace prize among his distinctions was "to get almost everybody to call him 'Doctor'."

Mr Hitchens's curtain-raiser deals with Mr Kissinger's role during the run-up to election day in 1968. Mr Hitchens claims that the Americans who were negotiating in Paris with the North Vietnamese confided in Mr Kissinger that a halt to the bombing of North Vietnam was in the works. His story continues with Mr Kissinger passing this information on to Richard Nixon in a successful job-seeking effort. Candidate Nixon then uses the tip to urge the South Vietnamese government to stand firm against any agreement that might have helped the Democratic candidate, Hubert Humphrey. His tactic succeeds in delaying the end of the American bombing of North Vietnam and helps get Nixon elected. The result is four more years of an unwinnable and murderous war. By Mr Hitchens's logic, Mr Kissinger is responsible for the continuation of the war.

In "A Tangled Web" (1998), William Bundy, Lyndon Johnson's assistant secretary of state for Far Eastern affairs, presented a careful study of Mr Kissinger's foreign policy under President Nixon. Mr Bundy was decidedly unsympathetic to the conduct of Mr Kissinger. Nonetheless, after examining the evidence at length, Mr Bundy concluded that Mr Kissinger had never passed along that inside information. Even if he had, this would reflect only on Mr Kissinger's morality but would have no bearing on any charge of criminality. Mr Hitchens does not try to show that Mr Kissinger was involved in, supported, or was even aware of Republican efforts to impede the Paris negotiations.

There is no attempt to connect the dots.

Ralph Waldo Emerson, after reading a less than convincing attack on Plato by an adolescent Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., advised the youth, that "when you strike at a king you must kill him." Mr Hitchens, on a good day, is one of the wickedest controver salists around. In "The Trial of Henry Kissinger" he has barely grazed a formidable target.

Motor mergers

Breakdowns

END OF THE ROAD: BMW AND ROVER— A BRAND TOO FAR. By Chris Brady and Andrew Lorenz. Financial Times/Prentice Hall; 174 pages; £19.99.

WHEELS ON FIRE: THE AMAZING INSIDE STORY OF THE DAIMLERCHRYSLER MERGER. By David Waller. Hodder & Stoughton; 334 pages; $29.95 and £18.99

IN 1994, BMW bought Rover, the last major British-owned car company, in an effort to become a mass-market manufacturer and achieve economies of scale. Altogether it poured £4.5 billion ($7 billion) into the deal, an investment which was completely wasted. BMW sold the company a year ago for £10.

In 1998, Daimler-Benz, also based in south Germany, in Stuttgart, bought Chrysler, the smallest of the "Big Three" American car companies in Detroit, for much the same reason. At the time, this, the biggest industrial merger anywhere, was widely hailed as a master stroke. Since last summer, however, Chrysler, once the most profitable car maker in America, has tumbled into loss and has gobbled up nearly all of the $7 billion it had set aside for a rainy day, just as the American economy may be heading into recession. Those Chrysler bosses who had not already

She liked him

THE ECONOMIST APRIL 21ST 2001

TOTAL P.01

News recently: During his confirmation hearings, attorney general-designate John Ashcroft said the Supreme Court's rulings on abortion are "the settled law of the land," and added, "I don't think it's the agenda of the president-elect of the United States to seek an opportunity to overturn Roe." He wasn't speaking off the cuff; these words were carefully prepared by the Bush transition team, and are sure

The movement should now
dedicate itself to passing an
abortion-survivor law.

to be read back to the first Supreme Court nominee Bush sends to the Senate: "Do you agree with Attorney General Ashcroft that Roe is 'the settled law of the land'?" Then there was Laura Bush's statement on the *Today* show that "I don't think that [Roe] should be overturned." The pro-life movement was eager to have a Republican First Lady who shares their

views; but if there's a litmus test for determining who is pro-life, opposition to Roe is a pretty good one. Perhaps Mrs. Bush, like many Americans, is confused about what overturning Roe would accomplish. In any event, her statement was hardly encouraging to pro-lifers—who would do well to start looking for some concrete accomplishments.

There are several reasonable steps the Bush team could take in the short term. They could reverse Clinton-era guidelines that allow research resulting in the destruction of human embryos, and push for increased penalties for crimes committed against pregnant women, as well as a prohibition on taking minors across state lines for the purpose of evading abortion restrictions.

What's more, the pro-life movement as a whole should now dedicate itself to passing an abortion-survivor law on the federal level, and should do so with the same intensity it recently devoted to the partial-birth-abortion ban. The Born-Alive Infants Protection Act would protect children who live through an abortion procedure. There have been several reports of this actually happening; the children involved died when they were denied medical attention. Forty-one states already have laws along these lines.

If a federal abortion-survivor law were to save even a single life, it would be worthwhile. It would also serve another important function: It would acknowledge the rights of children as independent from those of their mothers. Pro-choice politicians have been very successful at focusing on the health of women in the context of abortion, without ever making reference to the interests of their children. Virtually everyone this side of NARAL agrees that the line between abortion and infanticide must be drawn somewhere; the whole partial-birth-abortion effort was a failed attempt to do this. Delivering explicit rights to babies who somehow outlive abortions is a reasonable place to start. It's not even a new idea; Hadley Arkes first proposed it on these pages more than twelve years ago ("How to Roll Back Roe," October 28, 1988). Since then, Arkes has been a dogged advocate of this legislation, calling it a "modest first step." It's a modest step the pro-life movement should now take. Call it a baby step. NR

FEB 05 2001

INTERNATIONAL LAW

One Man's
War Criminal . . .

A mad leftist project,
revealed

JOHN O'SULLIVAN

LAST weekend in New York, it was all but impossible to buy the latest issue of *Harper's*. The magazine contained the first half of Christopher Hitchens's vast "indictment" of Henry Kissinger as a war criminal, for carrying out a foreign policy of which Hitchens disapproves; and it had sold out in the first 15 or so places I checked. A second installment is forthcoming in the March issue, but having read the first, I predict that the next issue will not sell out. Hitchens writes gracefully, as always, but his organization of the complicated material is rambling, tortuous, and confused.

Not without reason, however—for clarity would be fatal to his argument. Insofar as his thesis can be briefly summed up, it is that Kissinger can and should be prosecuted for carrying out policies that are now recognized under the "Pinochet precedent" as war crimes or crimes against humanity. His indictment has several weaknesses: In some cases, the actions denounced by Hitchens are not war crimes; in others, Kissinger did not commit them; in still others, both.

A wonderful example of this last was pointed out by columnist George Jonas in Canada's *National Post*. Jonas noted that Hitchens cited Kissinger's mere contemplation of bombing North Vietnamese dikes as evidence of a "regnant mentality" disposed seriously to consider committing war crimes. But destroying dikes to weaken North Vietnam's economy would have been not a war crime, but an attack on a legitimate military target. The British destroyed German dams in World War II, and the NATO bombing of Serbia in the Kosovo war also targeted its economic infrastructure. If Hitchens believes such acts to be war crimes, why

24

NATIONAL REVIEW/FEBRUARY 19, 2001

[LC]

is he targeting Kissinger (who, after all, rejected them) rather than Tony Blair and Bill Clinton, who carried them out? The idea is absurd. Hitchens can nonetheless content himself with having invented a new international felony: a "war-thought-crime."

When it comes to actions that Kissinger actually took—or, more precisely, for which he bore a partial responsibility as a member of the Nixon administration—the indictment becomes nothing more than restaging of leftist anti-Vietnam nostalgia. Kissinger is accused, for instance, of "treating two whole countries—Laos and Cambodia—as if they were disposable hamlets." This accusation should, instead, be leveled at the North Vietnamese, who took over entire portions of Cambodia and used them as bases to supply their forces and attack U.S. and South Vietnamese troops. Objecting to this intrusion on their neutrality, the Cambodians invited the U.S. to evict the North Vietnamese. What subsequently happened to the Cambodian people was a tragedy—but it

was one begun by the North Vietnamese and completed by their sometime allies, the Khmer Rouge, who were in fact guilty of monumental crimes against humanity.

Hitchens sees the entire American prosecution of the Vietnam War after October 1968 as, in itself, a gigantic war crime—and all who died between October 1968 and April 1975 as victims crying out to The Hague for vengeance. Or, as he writes: "Kissinger had to know that every casualty in Indochina after 1968 was avoidable."

Even if that were so, it would not justice placing on Kissinger the entire blame for decisions taken by a democratically elected government. But it is not so. Hitchens's whole indictment on the Vietnam issue rests on the delusion that the North Vietnamese were willing to reach a genuine compromise at the Paris peace talks in October 1968. Given that assumption, he charges Kissinger with two crimes: being part of a Republican plot to encourage President Thieu of South Vietnam to resist the peace deal so that Nixon would win the 1968 election;

and then continuing a needless war for partisan political purposes.

Neither charge survives examination. To begin with, the 1968 "bombing pause" that Hitchens supposes would have brought about peace was itself a partisan decision designed to win the election for Hubert Humphrey—as the memoirs of Anatoly Dobrynin, among other Soviet sources, reveal: "With the presidential election only days away and Humphrey trailing in the public opinion polls largely because of his identification with Johnson's conduct of the war, [Secretary of State Dean] Rusk telephoned on October 31 to inform me that the president would announce the complete cessation of bombing North Vietnam the following day."

Further, the eventual 1972-3 peace agreement was itself made possible only by U.S. and South Vietnamese military successes. The agreement was a de facto recognition by Hanoi in 1972 that they were not certain to win—a recognition they had been unwilling to make in 1968. Those who died in the intervening years

25

[10]

were the victims not of Kissinger, but of
North Vietnamese aggression.

Hitchens's indictment, then, is a slow-
motion replay of the radical Left's stan-
dard grievances of the 1970s. Why, then,
does Hitchens deserve the thanks of all
sensible people for slogging his way
through it?

Hitchens's article appeared in a major
magazine. It apparently sold out, at least
in Manhattan. And it has been treated
respectfully by some mainstream news
organizations—notably an approving
article in the January 30 *Washington Post*
by Peter Carlson (whose irony, alas, con-
tains more lead than a church roof).
Here—placed before a large and influen-
tial audience—is proof that the idea of
arresting and putting on trial a distin-
guished former secretary of state is no
longer a sort of disgusting joke, but actu-
ally thinkable. Indeed, as Jeremy Rabkin,
a Cornell specialist in international law,
points out, the FBI issued a discreet
warning a year ago to former American
officials not to visit countries where they
might be seized for trial—and there were
some West European countries on the
list. The proposed International Criminal
Court even encourages such trials in its
preamble, which states that "it is the duty
of every State to exercise its jurisdiction
over those responsible for international
crimes." The rules under which former
officials might be tried are disturbingly
flexible and reliant on shifting definitions
of "war crimes" and "crimes against hu-
manity." Pinochet, for instance, was tried
under the U.N. Torture Convention
because it provided the British court with
the convenient justification of "universal
jurisdiction"—even though the charge
was based on the beating of a suspect in a
Chilean police station, of which incident
Pinochet was almost certainly unaware
and which occurred when he was on the
verge of leaving power and had every
incentive not to murder bystanders.

This, in short, is why we must be grate-
ful to Hitchens: He has given us an
advance copy of the indictment some
future secretary of state might face—a
rehash of the indignant platitudes of the
journalistic Left, dressed up in legal jar-
gon by lawyers from Amnesty Inter-
national or Human Rights Watch.

We have been very adequately warned.
We owe Hitchens a hearty meal, before
our own execution.
NR

■ HOLLYWOOD ■

Like, Strike,
Dude

The Hollywood
writer-worker

ROB LONG

THE only thing worse than being in a
meeting with three writers is being
in a meeting with 300 writers, which
unfortunately describes a meeting of the
Writers Guild of America, West.

Every few years, the WGA—the putative trade union of screenwriters—suffers an institutional nervous breakdown as its members, made up entirely of writers and therefore unable to agree on anything, attempt to agree on the terms of a new contract with the studios. The current contract expires on May 1, and for the past few months Hollywood has been thick with strike talk.

The sticking point invariably centers
around some new profit source exploited
by the studios—DVD sales, say, or pay-
per-view satellite broadcasts—that they
have neglected to pass on to the writer.
The working writers—and that number
is considerably smaller than 100 percent
of the membership of the WGA, West—
tend to be philosophical about these
issues. Sure, we get angry and bitter. But
we're writers. We were angry and bitter
before we got into this business. In some
cases I could mention, anger and bitter-
ness were the primary inspiration to sad-
dle up and move to Los Angeles in the
first place. I know one guy who became a
television writer simply because it afford-
ed him the opportunity to write on a cop
show and name all the strippers, crack
whores, and nude female corpses after his
mother.

The non-working writers are a more
querulous lot. Some are retired and liv-
ing in affluent boredom. For them, a

Mr. Long is an NR contributing editor
and a non-unemployed Hollywood
television writer.

messy writers strike is an exercise in self-
dramatics. What fun to glide over to the
picket line in their BMWs and Bentleys
and get into a Clifford O'dets-style
working-class dustup! And how nice to
be able to do it in temperate Los Angeles,
so warm and dry and generously supplied
with upscale lunch spots.

The second group of non-working
writers are the unemployed. These are
writers who haven't sold a script or drawn
a writer's paycheck in years, but who
remain passionately involved members of
the guild and its hardest-to-satisfy voting
bloc. For some reason, years of unem-
ployment do not lead to difficult person-
al decisions ("I must stop dreaming of
success and riches. I must stop talking to
my friends about my next big script sale. I
must realize that my job at Blockbuster is
not just 'temporary' or a 'great place to
people-watch and get material,' but,
instead, my true livelihood, and I will
begin to treat it as such by arriving on
time and in uniform, and not waste a
customer's time criticizing his rental
choices"), but rather to a stubborn and
highly irrelevant obsession with the
writer's potential share of hypothetical
ancillary revenue generated by a script
that hasn't been written, and if written
won't be sold unless the writer is repre-
sented by an agent, who won't sign him
because—and this is crucial—*his scripts
don't sell*. Did I mention that this is the
largest segment of the voting population
of the WGA?

Freed from the burden of actually hav-
ing to show up to a job every day, they
look to the occasional strike to round out
their social calendar, to catch up with old
friends on the picket line. And since all
writers crave excuses for not writing,
what better excuse for being unproduc-
tive than a strike? Writing? Not me. I'm
honoring my brother and sister scribes! I'm
taking part in the labor movement! Lazy!
Untalented? Nope. Just committed to
social justice. Rarely has sitting on your
ass outside the studio gates, carrying a
picket sign while eating a ham sandwich,
ever seemed so glamorous.

So, the working writers especially
the young ones—hate strike talk. A
strike means television- and movie-
production halts. Paychecks stop coming.
Writers with cushy studio deals (ahem)
find that their contracts enter something
called "suspend and extend," which

76

[LC]

Ever wondered what Ian Rankin reads?

* Search Telegraph reviews

* Find & buy any UK book

* Telegraph titles

* Bestsellers

* Front page

* Help and e-mail

booksonline
with **amazon.co.uk**

an **electronic Telegraph** publication.

<table><tr><td><strong>title</strong></td><td>The Trial of Henry Kissinger</td></tr><tr><td><strong>author</strong></td><td>Christopher Hitchens</td></tr><tr><td><strong>category</strong></td><td>Biography - Biography</td></tr><tr><td><strong>reviewer</strong></td><td>Raymond Seitz</td></tr><tr><td><strong>date reviewed</strong></td><td>23 April 2001</td></tr><tr><td><strong>publisher</strong></td><td>Verso</td></tr><tr><td><strong>date published</strong></td><td>23 April 2001</td></tr><tr><td><strong>format</strong></td><td>Hardback</td></tr><tr><td><strong>ISBN</strong></td><td>1859846319</td></tr></table>

No case against Kissinger

An unconvincing indictment of the statesman

THE PRINCIPAL trial in Christopher Hitchens's latest book is reading it. Although Hitchens is purportedly building a legal case against the former American Secretary of State, he is in fact a one-man lynch mob. Kissinger, he tells us, is a vicious, blood-thirsty, egomaniacal profiteering fiend, a kind of black-cloaked Bela Lugosi of statecraft, who in the course of eight demonic years as National Security Advisor and then Secretary of State (1969-1977) was personally responsible for numerous instances of mass murder and assorted other war crimes in corners of the globe as varied as East Timor, Bangladesh, Cyprus and Chile.

Hitchens was obviously delighted by the detention of General Pinochet last year in Britain while Her Majesty's government tried to figure out how to respond to an extradition order from a Spanish magistrate. He believes the decision by the House of Lords upholding the Spanish request effectively destroyed the defence of "sovereign immunity".

The Pinochet imbroglio ended in such a fog that the importance of the legal precedent has yet to be established. At the time, however, there were many thoughtful observers who harboured little sympathy for Pinochet but who worried that the case itself would open the door to feckless, self-righteous charges against other political leaders in other legal circumstances. This is a concern which Mr Hitchens's scurrilous attack appears to validate.

Hitchens begins his breathless indictment by revealing a secret.

http://www.booksonline.co.uk/books?ac=004841371203849&rtmo=lvHunwvt.../botrial2.htm 4/23/01

[Lc]

"Here is the secret in plain words", he announces. "In the fall of 1968, Richard Nixon and some of his emissaries and underlings set out to sabotage the Paris peace negotiations on Vietnam . . . and the chief beneficiary of the covert action, and of the subsequent slaughter, was Henry Kissinger."

The attempt by the Nixon presidential campaign to undermine the talks in Paris may still be a secret in Omaha but it is pretty well known everywhere else. It was a deplorable act and possibly illegal in American law. It is equally true, however, that the Paris talks were a sham.

Hitchens none the less insinuates vaguely that Kissinger was responsible for the collapse of the conference and therefore the prolongation of the war and therefore the prolongation of the killing and therefore he is a murderer. As in most of the book this is prosecution by flimsy innuendo.

Hitchens rises to the risible in his chapter on East Timor. Here he quotes at length from a memorandum of a conversation in which Kissinger excoriates his aides for dispatching a cable that would effectively suspend arms sales to Indonesia. As usual, Kissinger berates his subordinates and frets about leaks. At the crescendo of his diatribe, he says, "I don't care if we sell equipment to Indonesia or not. I get nothing from it. I get no rakeoff."

This is nothing more than classic Kissingerian sarcasm. But the ever-forensic Hitchens cries a sly, Holmesian "Ah ha!" and asks why Kissinger "felt it necessary to deny he could profit personally from arms shipments, a denial for which nobody had asked him." Hitchens is so riveted by this "evidence" that the quote merits an "Afterword" at the end of the book in which Hitchens explains how Kissinger today makes a lot of money by influence peddling and consorting with capitalists. Such clumsy, vitriolic acrobatics characterise almost all of Hitchens's examples throughout the book.

Henry Kissinger steered American foreign policy through eight difficult years when the Cold War was at its most global. He made a lot of mistakes and no one would ever accuse him of moral preoccupations. He managed to outrage both the left and the right of the American political spectrum. But to accuse him of criminality is an altogether different order of business. Christopher Hitchens is a challenging journalist and gifted writer. Blackstone he is not.

* Raymond Seitz was US Ambassador to the UK from 1991 to 1994.

find more like this

quicksearch

this week's booksonline

go

>>> >>> >>>

http://www.booksonline.co.uk/booksol?ac=004841371203849&rtmo=lvHunwvt.../botrial2.htm 4/23/01

[Lc]

THE ABRIDGE TIMES
E-services
times appointments

WH Smith.co.uk Exclusive 45% discount to THE ABRIDGE TIMES readers

SEBASTIAN FAULKS's new novel
On Green Dolphin Street at £9.35 (plus p&p)

IN

THE ABRIDGE TIMES

HOME

BRITISH NEWS

WORLD NEWS

SPORT

BUSINESS

COMMENT

FEATURES

SPECIALS

BACK TO MAIN INDEX

E-MAIL THIS PAGE TO A FRIEND

E-MAIL THE SECTION EDITOR

TUESDAY MARCH 20 2001

Rewriting the past for the battles of today

MICHAEL GOVE

History is being distorted in a growing assault on truth and memory

Two men have recently tried to grab Justice's sword to refight history's battles. David Irving is a discredited figure of the far Right, Christopher Hitchens a celebrated gadfly of the New Left, Irving's reputation lies in tatters, Hitchens enjoys a *passepartout* to the salons of Washington and London, Irving is a study in wickedness, Hitchens one in mischief. But both have been engaged in attempts to diminish past totalitarian crimes the better to advance contemporary political agendas. Neither can afford to be dismissed as a mere littérateur

whose only aim is to challenge conventional wisdom, as two new books show.

The *Holocaust on Trial; History, Justice and the David Irving Libel Case* by D.D.Guttenplan demonstrates how Irving set out to use our libel courts to provide a platform for his revisionist account of the Second World War. *The Trial of Henry Kissinger* by Christopher Hitchens is an attempt by the author to use the establishment of an international criminal court as a platform for his own revisionist account of the Cold War.

Irving found himself in the libel courts because of his obsessive desire to diminish and downplay the transcendent evil of the Holocaust. His revisionist reading of the Second World War sets out to challenge the historical fact of Hitler's genocidal campaign against the Jews. Irving's Holocaust denial, as Guttenplan shows, is not simply a wicked intellectual conceit but central to his twisted ideology. The fact of the Holocaust is the single greatest obstacle to the rehabilitation of the far-right views which Irving holds. By denying the Holocaust's historical singularity, or even its existence, apologists for the far Right seek to re-establish Hitler and the Nazi regime as legitimate players in history's pageant from whom the Post-Modern polemicist may draw "interesting" lessons.

http://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/0,,252-101947,00.html

5/8/01

[LC]

When Irving's malicious agenda and malign *modus operandi* were exposed by Deborah Lipstadt in her book *Denying the Holocaust; the Growing Assault on Truth and Memory*, he recognised a threat to his project and sued. Because the English libel courts still, inexplicably, place upon the defendant the burden of proving his innocence, Irving hoped that the odds would be tilted in his favour. In any event, he calculated, he would be given a public platform for his revisionism. Fortunately, his calculations were undone by the meticulous deconstruction of his case by Lipstadt's lawyers. He was shown to have suppressed, altered and doctored the truth to serve his own ends and his reputation took a battering from which, mercifully, it can never recover.

But revisionism is not the sole preserve of the far Right, and Hitchens's book is a timely reminder of the rewriting of history being attempted by the Left. Just as the crimes of Nazism constitute an ineradicable obstacle to the promotion of far-right ideology, so the corpse-littered history of communism impedes the radical ambitions of many on the New Left.

That real existing socialism led to the extinguishing of millions of real existing human beings is too much reality for many Left radicals to bear. That communism was defeated by the exertions of Conservative leaders such as Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan in the liberal democracies of America and Britain makes reality, and history, insupportable for them. So history must be rewritten.

Hitchens and his fellow travellers recognise that the gulags cannot be written out of our past, so they attempt to pitch new "facts" into Justice's scales. They replay the old game of "moral equivalence" by charging the West with war crimes as great as any committed in communism's name. By so doing, they seek to diminish the evil of socialist totalitarianism and weaken the moral authority of those liberal democracies in the West, most notably America, whose past victories and present policies they cannot bear.

Fortunately for history, and the West, Hitchens has none of the cool mastery of facts required to support his ends. Hitchens has chosen Kissinger as a still vital survivor of the Cold War, a living reminder of our struggles, and sought to demonise him by laying at his door every conceivable abuse of human rights. Kissinger, and by extension the West, are held accountable for sins as varied as the genocide of Bangladeshis, the murder of Chilean generals, the deposing of

5/8/01

[lc]

Cypriot leaders and the sabotaging of Vietnamese peace talks. In Hitchens's account of the Cold War Kissinger lurks at the centre of every conspiracy, a malign intelligence directing world evil which might have leapt from the *Protocols of the Elders of Zion*.

Hitchens is much more a poor man's Oliver Stone than a latter-day Hartley Shawcross. In his scattergun mix of occasional fact, tendentious interpretation and wishful thinking he resembles a Hollywood conspiracy theorist more than the coolly rational prosecutor of war crimes he imagines himself to be.

And yet Hitchens's allegations have been serialised with all solemnity by *Harpers*'

magazine in the United States and *The Guardian* here. That one of America's leading liberal magazines and Britain's pre-eminent left-wing broadsheet should be so eager to indulge Hitchens's revisionism tells us something about the appetite for denigration of their own countries among the West's leftish elites. It may seem amusing to play *Knock Down Ginger* with Dr Kissinger's reputation, ringing the leper's bell which peals "war criminal" and then running away. But the consequences are more malign than they appear to recognise. By placing Dr Kissinger in the dock, they collude in the attempt to let communism off the hook. They are, in Lipstadt's words, part of a growing assault on truth and memory.

michael.gove@thetimes.co.uk

Copyright 2001 **Times Newspapers Ltd.** This service is provided on Times Newspapers' **standard terms and conditions**. To inquire about a licence to reproduce material from The Times, visit the **Syndication website**.

HELP

CROSSWORD

MOBILETIMES
SMS & PDA SERVICES

NEWS SPORT BUSINESS

SEARCH

CONTACT US

TERMS & CONDITIONS

THE DAILY TIMES & THE SUNDAY TIMES

FANTASY FORMULA 7

Austrian Grand Prix - May 13

THE
DAILY
TIMES

5/8/01

[L.C.]

to suck') in Germany. If in six war years the record sold only 50,000 copies, the song was maturing, deepening, in Billie's ever more drugged and tragic rendition: 'throat-tightening' as *Time* put it, certainly no 'June-moon-croon tune' as she put it herself.

But American jazz critic Ralph Gleason heads the hyperbolists: 'She was a sort of living lyric to the song, hanging, not on a poplar tree, but on the limbs of life itself.' Over 60 years the Meeropol family earned a skimpy $300,000 for it. These admiring and admirable pages put both the issues and the verses chicly in perspective for a new century that shows few signs of growing out of the need for such spirited arias of rage.

A parody
of
justice

Conrad Black

THE TRIAL OF HENRY
KISSINGER

by Christopher Hitchens

Verso, £13, pp. 170, ISBN 1859846319

This is not really a book at all. It is a malicious polemic from a notorious pamphleteer. Having relentlessly supported the communist side in the Cold War, Christopher Hitchens has here tried to cast one of the most distinguished statesmen of the Western Alliance as a criminal of that war. Henry Kissinger is such a unique personality that he is a particular source of frustration to his enemies. A formidable academic historian and theorist of international affairs as well as one of the outstanding secretaries of state in American history, he continues, nearly 25 years after leaving public office, to be a statesman of great renown and continuing influence.

Kissinger has always been a *bête noire* to the Western seekers of communist victory in the Cold War. Because of his heavy German accent and transcultural syntax, he has been a goldmine for parody by comics and impersonators. This folkloric status and the eminent role he played in the Nixon administration, the most controversial of all American presidencies, have made him the supreme target of the old Western Left, to whose endless mudslinging his reputation has been practically impervious. Few on the left have been more slavishly and unrigorously hostile than Christopher Hitchens.

When Richard Nixon and Henry

Kissinger came to office in 1969 the United States had 545,000 conscripts in an undeclared war at the ends of the earth, no arms control negotiations with the USSR, no worthwhile contacts with China, and almost no relations with the Arab powers apart from Jordan, Tunisia and Morocco. The Soviet Union and its allies were generally gaining ground in their conflict with the West and almost casually suppressed efforts at liberalisation in the Eastern bloc, as in Prague in 1968.

After five years, the United States had negotiated its departure from Vietnam with as much dignity as the circumstances allowed. It had negotiated an arms limitation agreement with the USSR, the beginning of a civilised relationship with China, and the US-brokered beginning of the normalisation of relations between Israel and some of its Arab neighbours, with the consequent elimination of almost all Soviet influence in the Middle East. Kissinger further irritated his enemies by remaining untouched by the Watergate scandal and by winning the Nobel Prize for Peace.

All of this rankles with Hitchens and others in the West who regret the Western victory in the Cold War and especially the emergence of the United States as an overwhelmingly pre-eminent power in the world. The first lie is in the title of this work, which, as much as the identity of the

been adduced, and certainly isn't here, that he had any role in any such activity.

Hitchens drags out the old allegations that Kissinger was complicit in the deaths of Chile's Marxist President Allende and apolitical chief of staff General Rene Schneider in 1973. These charges have been exhaustively explored by US Senate committees almost as anxious as Hitchens to assassinate Kissinger's reputation. The evidence is decisive that Kissinger stopped US assistance to a coup attempt and had nothing at all to do with the death of either man and that he disapproved and regretted both events. Hitchens construes the absence of any evidence inculpatory of Kissinger as proof of Kissinger's destruction of evidence. He dismisses the evidence of Kissinger's innocence as his littering the trail of investigators with red herrings of his own confection. Hitchens mustn't be confused with the facts. Where the evidence is inconvenient it must be false, and where there is no evidence to support his case, it must have been destroyed by the accused. This is the method of Stalin's show trials and possesses at least intellectual consistency with this author's previous work.

Kissinger is accused of masterminding the attempted murder of Cyprus's President, Archbishop Makarios. Kissinger's memoirs are triumphantly quoted to the effect that Makarios was the core of the problem, and that therefore Kissinger must have schemed to get rid of him. Unfortunately, with astonishing sloppiness even for a Stalinist prosecutor, Hitchens omits the balance of the same sentence from Kissinger's book; that Makarios was also the key to any solution. No evidence whatever is, or could be, presented to sustain this ludicrous allegation. It is far-fetched even for so scurrilous an assailant.

This is Hitchens' trial: no evidence other than what he invents or falsifies. It is a malicious and bungled prosecution. The accused is condemned for having possibly entertained thoughts that, if he had acted upon them, would have been controversial, what John O'Sullivan described in the *National Review* as the 'war thought crime'. This isn't legitimate argument; it is an attempt to goad one of the 20th century's greatest statesmen into a lawsuit, thus briefly elevating Hitchens to a plane of official parity with the eminent figure he has defamed. It appears also to be an attempt to win the commendation of the bedraggled remnant of the old Left to which Hitchens has been a toady for decades.

It is shaming that *Harper's* and the *Guardian* excerpted this book, but reassuring that it has been condemned by virtually every reviewer in the world. It is so contemptible that it almost makes a case for judicial book-burning; almost, but not quite. It should be preserved as evidence of the final bankruptcy, both evil and banal, of the old left.

authof, betrays his character. It isn't a trial, which implies a judicial process including a defence and a deliberation. It is a defamatory and frenzied assault.

Henry Kissinger is accused of scheming to prevent a breakthrough in the Paris Vietnam peace talks in 1968 to help Richard Nixon win the US presidential election. He didn't know Nixon then and he had nothing to do with the election campaign. Not a shred of evidence has ever

THE SPECTATOR 19 May 2001 45

[lc]

The Telegraph - Friday, May 4, 2001 - Issue 2170

feature

(from telegraph.co.uk)

## Is this man a war criminal?

Journalist Christopher Hitchens has written a savage biography of Henry Kissinger, in which he paints the former US secretary of state as a sinister manipulator of foreign governments. But, writes George Jonas, the book is a mess of half-truths and fantasy

CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS does not like Henry Kissinger. He does not like him politically, which he acknowledges in his book The Trial of Henry Kissinger (published by Verso, the imprint of New Left Books), and he does not like him personally, which he does not specifically acknowledge, but makes abundantly clear in numerous asides.

### External Links

* **Henry A. Kissinger 1973**
* **Nobel Peace Prize Laureate**
* **- Novel Prize Internet Archive**

* **Henry Alfred Kissinger biography - Nobel e-museum**

* **Henry Kissinger page - Third World Traveller**

* **Trial of Henry Kissinger - Verso Books**

* **United Nations**

* **National Security Study Memorandums (NSSM) [Nixon]**

## The President's Man: Kissinger with Richard Nixon

Mr Hitchens offers the view that Dr Kissinger's "manneirs are rather gross" and that "his single greatest achievement has been to get almost everybody to call him 'Doctor' ". Not a flattering portrait, but it does follow an

[L]

**Administration, 1969-74]**

internal logic if one is attempting, as Mr Hitchens does, to build a case against one of the most significant statesmen of the 20th century as a war criminal.

**Nixon Foundation**

Suggesting that Dr Kissinger - a scholar and administrator, who, as former national security adviser and secretary of state to US presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford, had been the chief architect of detente with the Soviet Union, disengagement in Vietnam, and rapprochement with China - is a war criminal is not easy. (If one considers Dr Kissinger's policies of accommodation with various communist powers, it would be easier to suggest that he is a peace criminal.) The accusation gets no less nonsensical as Mr Hitchens proceeds to elaborate on his charges, but the reasons behind it begin to emerge.

Early on in his book, Mr Hitchens assumes the role of a mind reader. He conjures up an image of Dr Kissinger at a dinner party. "Every now and then," he writes, "the recipient (and donor) of so much sycophancy feels a tremor of anxiety. He leaves the well-furnished table and scurries to the bathroom. Is it perhaps another disclosure on a newly released Nixon tape? Some stray news from Indonesia, portending the fall or imprisonment of another patron (and perhaps the escape of an awkward document or two)?

"Kissinger cannot open the morning paper with the assurance of tranquillity. Because he knows what others can only suspect, or guess at."

Leaving aside the difficulty of reading the mind

[lc]

of a fellow dinner guest, by the end of the paragraph Mr Hitchens is forced to concede that "others can only suspect, or guess at" what such a dinner guest knows. In other words, Mr Hitchens admits he is guessing, but this does not prevent him from starting the paragraph by placing "a tremor of anxiety" - ie, a consciousness of guilt - into Dr Kissinger's mind.

This device might be acceptable in a novel - except this is not a novel. Mr Hitchens is not an omniscient narrator, and Dr Kissinger is not a fictional character. In an account that purports to be factual, pretending to read a person's mind, then utilising it as a confession is so transparently malicious and misleading as to make one discount everything that follows it. Mr Hitchens is scathing, but he is scathing on thin ice.

In chapter one, entitled "Curtain-Raiser: the Secret of '68", Mr Hitchens levels one of his key accusations against Dr Kissinger. It is that to advance his own career, the future national security adviser played a pivotal role in Republican presidential candidate Richard Nixon's efforts "to sabotage the Paris peace negotiations on Vietnam" before the 1968 elections.

The alleged method of sabotage was for Mr Nixon to privately persuade South Vietnamese president Nguyen Van Thieu (or, as Mr Hitchens puts it, "the South Vietnamese military rulers") to ditch the talks because he, Nixon, could get a better deal for Saigon from Hanoi than Democratic candidate Hubert Humphrey. According to Mr Hitchens, Dr Kissinger acted as

[Lc]

a kind of mole for Mr Nixon in this effort, which
extended the war by four years, resulting in
thousands of casualties on both sides.

Perhaps the most nonsensical thing about this
charge is that it is predicated on President Thieu
having illusions about North Vietnam's Ho Chi
Minh. In fact, Thieu hardly required
inducements from American presidential
candidates to be suspicious of Hanoi's peace
negotiations. In any event, the negotiations
were not scuttled by Thieu. The peace talks,
deadlocked on procedural issues from
November 1, started again under the Johnson
administration when Saigon accepted a Soviet
offer of compromise - on Nixon's urging and
before his inauguration.

A better case could be made out (and has been,
in Soviet ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin's
memoirs, among other places) for the
proposition that the Democratic administration's
peace initiative and bombing halt, shortly before
the 1968 elections, was timed to get Hubert
Humphrey elected. If anyone was using Vietnam
for domestic politics, it was the Democrats.

Mr Hitchens is aware of this argument; in an
appendix to his book, he counters that even "if
the Johnson-Humphrey regime sought to time
the talks for their own electoral purposes" they
had not done so behind the scenes, but "in
public view, and as the legally elected and
constituted government of the United States".
Presumably this makes the timing of bombing
halts for electoral purposes all right.

In chapter five of his book, Mr Hitchens outlines

[Lc]

what he regards as Dr Kissinger's sinister role in
Chile. This requires some background.

Between 1970 and 1973, the world was not a
tranquil place. While Dr Salvador Allende
Gossens was importing communism to Chile,
Palestinian organisations hijacked aeroplanes to
Jordan, massacred 11 Israeli athletes in Munich
and murdered two American diplomats (Cleo
Noel and George Moore) in Khartoum.
Communist influence was rampant. The times
were not conducive to viewing with equanimity
Dr Allende, who (as Regis Debray tells it in his
book The Chilean Revolution: Conversations
with Allende) plainly stated that he aimed at
establishing "total, scientific, Marxist socialism"
in Chile.

After Dr Allende's death, Left-wing legends of
injured innocence painted him as a kind of
social democratic reformer. He was nothing of
the sort. As Dr Kissinger puts it in The White
House Years: "One should not needlessly insult
the integrity of a man who spent his life
dedicated to revolution by claiming him to be
something he always denied."

Dr Kissinger's view of Dr Allende has never been
a secret: it is plainly expressed on every
relevant page of his memoirs. He considered Dr
Allende and his policies inimical to the interests
of America, as well as the ideals of democracy.
No doubt, Dr Kissinger welcomed Dr Allende's
downfall (though, as he emphasises, not his
violent death). What Mr Hitchens fails to provide
is any evidence that the US administration or Dr
Kissinger had brought about either.

[L]

The only evidence for any US involvement in Chile goes back to the autumn of 1970, before Dr Allende's inauguration. The majority (62.7 per cent) of Chile's voters had cast their ballots against Dr Allende, but since there were three candidates, Dr Allende, with 36.2 per cent, had the largest single share by about one per cent. Constitutionally, in such a situation, it was up to the Chilean Congress to choose the president.

The Nixon administration wanted to prevent Dr Allende from parlaying his one per cent into another foothold for totalitarian Marxism in Latin America. First it tried to persuade the Chilean Congress to select another candidate. When this did not work, it attempted what Dr Kissinger has described in *Years of Upheaval* as a "haphazard and amateurish exploration of a military coup", designed to force a run-off election between Dr Allende and the top democratic candidate. This effort was eventually called off: "More precisely," as Dr Kissinger notes, "the American part was called off, the Chilean component was bungled."

It is this bungled Chilean component to which Mr Hitchens is attempting to link Dr Kissinger. As it happened, the Chilean chief of staff, General René Schneider, was opposed to military interference in political matters. This being an obstacle to using the army to bring about a run-off election, some officers in the Chilean military, notably a group led by General Roberto Viaux, hatched a plot to kidnap General Schneider.

The US administration was aware of General Viaux's plans and provided his group with some

[lc]

initial support, but when it became evident that chances for a successful coup were less than one in 20, the US co-ordinating committee - called the 40 Committee - told the plotters to abandon their efforts. On October 15, 1970, Dr Kissinger wrote to President Nixon: "This looks hopeless. I turned it off. Nothing would be worse than an abortive coup." As it turned out, however, elements of General Viaux's plotters, along with elements of another group, and possibly aided by some rogue CIA assets in Chile, made two more unsuccessful attempts to kidnap General Schneider. Finally, on October 22, General Viaux's group made another attempt, in the course of which General Schneider was murdered.

In his role as a private prosecutor, Mr Hitchens charges that "Henry Kissinger bears direct responsibility for the Schneider murder". The problem for Mr Hitchens's prosecution is that the evidence at his disposal has been examined by a Senate Intelligence Committee, in 1975. Senator Frank Church's committee was not favourably disposed, to put it mildly, to the Nixon administration.

The Church committee nevertheless concluded that there was "no evidence of a plan to kill Schneider or that United States officials specifically anticipated that Schneider would be shot during the abduction". Mr Hitchens seeks to dispose of this finding by calling Dr Kissinger's instructions to stop the plotters "a paper-thin cover story", admitting with regret that "this sorry cover story has even found a refuge in the written record". The fact is, of course, that this is the record: the only thing

[Lc]

supported by evidence as well as by the finding
of a Senate committee.

Kissinger's
view of
Salvador
Allende has
never been a
secret: he
considered the
Chilean leader
and his policies
inimical to the
interests of
America, as
well as the
ideals of
democracy

The record also shows that Dr Kissinger wrote to President Nixon on October 18, 1970, that Dr Allende's inauguration "now appeared certain". He would hardly have written this if a coup had still been an option, or if he had anticipated General Viaux's kidnapping attempt that was to occur on October 22. Mr Hitchens further charges that Dr Kissinger cannot claim to have been "indifferent to, or unaware of, the true situation" of assassination, torture and other human rights abuses in the southern hemisphere. As evidence, he offers excerpts from a memorandum of a 1976 conversation (declassified in 1999) between Dr Kissinger and General Augusto Pinochet.

In fact, when read in its entirety, the declassified document shows the opposite of what Mr Hitchens suggests. Far from "advising a murderer and despot to disregard his upcoming remarks as a sop to Congress", which is the spin Mr Hitchens puts on the conversation between General Pinochet and the secretary of state, Dr Kissinger was advising

[1c]

Chile's president to take his remarks to heart. He was conveying a warning - diplomatically, but forcefully and unmistakably - that if General Pinochet wished to preserve the support he needed from the United States, his government had to make genuine efforts to conform to the notions western democracies had about the rule of law and civil rights.

When General Pinochet responded that "we are slowly making progress" on the human rights front, and "we have freed more" of the last 400 detainees, Dr Kissinger urged him to "have a bigger programme of releases". There was even to be a quid pro quo: the secretary knew some of the immediate items that General Pinochet wanted from the US - the embassy at Santiago had cabled him a list of matters "to provide encouragement and/or incentives to the GOC (Government of Chile) to respond to our concerns".

These concerns, of course, were human rights: not just as a gesture, but as a reality. What arouses Mr Hitchens's indignation is that in the memorandum, Dr Kissinger makes it equally clear to General Pinochet that the US administration is "not out to weaken your position" and that "we welcomed the overthrow of the Communist-inclined government here".

But why should the US secretary of state, a representative of Jeffersonian democracy, not have held that view? Anyone with the slightest concern for human rights would have had to welcome the slowing of the spread of communism in the western hemisphere. In the 1970s, communism was not yet a spent force.

[lc]

The system of applied Marxism that claimed (by
low estimates) 70 million victims in the 20th
century was still looking to extend itself in
various parts of the globe. Communism was
jeopardising human rights from Africa to the
Middle East. Although the US did not engineer
the downfall of Dr Allende in September 1973, it
had every reason to welcome it.

Other chapters of Mr Hitchens's book deal with
Indochina, Bangladesh and East Timor.
Essentially, the prosecution's method is similar:
Mr Hitchens concedes that "some of these
allegations can only be constructed prima facie,
since Dr Kissinger - in what may also amount to
a deliberate and premeditated obstruction of
justice - has caused large tranches of evidence
to be withheld or possibly destroyed". In other
words, Mr Hitchens turns his inability to come
up with sufficient evidence to prove his charges
against Dr Kissinger into another charge: that of
obstructing justice. The late A Y Vishinsky, who
used to run Stalin's show trials, would applaud.

In chapter seven, Mr Hitchens tells us why he
believes that Dr Kissinger should be held
responsible for "the bloody invasion of Cyprus".
Briefly, his case for the prosecution is that since
Dr Kissinger disliked the non-aligned Cypriot
president, the Archbishop Makarios, he took no
steps to prevent Greece's Right-wing military
junta ("a US client", in Mr Hitchens's words)
from engineering a coup against President
Makarios in July 1974.

As proof of Dr Kissinger's intentions, Mr
Hitchens quotes his description of President
Makarios as "the proximate cause of most of

[lc]

Cyprus's tensions" from Years of Renewal, the concluding volume of Dr Kissinger's memoirs. Mr Hitchens offers this fragment as the motive for Dr Kissinger's endorsement of a coup d'état: if Dr Kissinger felt that President Makarios was "the 'proximate cause' of the tensions", Mr Hitchens writes, "then his removal from the scene is self-evidently the cure for them". Very cute - except Mr Hitchens conveniently omits the full sentence in Dr Kissinger's book (p 199): "Makarios, the proximate cause of most of Cyprus's tensions, was also the best hope for a long-term peaceful solution". In Hollywood movies, this is where the lawyer puts down his notes and says: "The defence rests."

In his preface, Mr Hitchens contends that "the Pinochet verdict in London, the splendid activism of the Spanish magistracy and the verdicts of the International Tribunal at The Hague have destroyed the shield that immunised crimes committed under the justification of raison d'état". In fact, Mr Hitchens is ready to extend the principle a good deal further. He proposes to prosecute not only crimes but policy decisions made for reasons of state, provided they are policy decisions that run counter to his ideas.

Dressing up politics in black robes does not elevate politics, of course; it lowers justice. Incongruous as it is to discuss Dr Kissinger in the same breath with General Pinochet, the Pinochet extradition case does provide one object lesson. The lengthy wrangling in the British courts illustrated that whenever judges are inclined, for political or ideological reasons, to arrive at a certain result, they are likely to

[Lc]

find the legal props to support it.

General Pincochet's extradition made no sense in law as presented in the Spanish magistrate's initial request, which said in essence that the international treaty on genocide should be extended to cover the killings of political opponents, and also authorise trials in the national courts of other countries.

The Law Lords rejected this - not surprisingly, because the treaty contained no such provisions - but then agreed to have judge Baltasar Garzon's request amended under the UN Torture Convention, to which Britain became a signatory in 1988, resting the entire case on a single incident, the beating of a suspect in a provincial police station in Chile. (This incident took place after Chile had become a democracy and Pinochet's government was legitimised by a national referendum. It's rather like holding Tony Blair responsible for a policeman's alleged misconduct in Nottingham.)

What this indicates is that courts are not impervious to the climate. Although the idea of any country trying to prosecute a former US secretary of state on the basis of assertions such as Mr Hitchens's still seems only the erotic dream of neutered liberals and ex-flower children who have long fantasised about setting up a Holy Inquisition of the Left, the FBI has seen fit to issue quiet warnings to former American officials about travelling in some European countries. The danger that international systems of justice may be hijacked for political ends is quite real.