The Sunday Times: Terrorism

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September 16 2001

TERRORISM

America's former secretary of state and leading strategist tells Sarah Baxter that his country is suffering the consequences of being too soft on Saddam Hussein after the Gulf war. It should pursue the terrorists with maximum ferocity - but take care that it does not lead to an unlimited conflict it cannot control

Next: Bush tells US army to 'get ready' to crush Bin Laden

## Kissinger flies with the hawks

This is no time for jokes, but sometimes they go to the heart of the matter. Henry Kissinger, America's former national security adviser and secretary of state, knows just such a one.

"In the second world war, somebody asked how to solve the submarine problem. The answer was to heat the ocean and boil them to the surface." But that's not possible, everybody gasped. "Look," the answer came, "I've given you the idea, you worry about the practicalities."

There can be no clearer indication of President George W Bush's dilemma. Drastic action against the terrorists who attacked New York and Washington is necessary. On that, almost everybody in America is agreed. But what is to be done? It is time to think the impossible and prepare for the achievable.

Kissinger has just published a book, Does America Need a Foreign Policy?, in which he argues that the nation is at its zenith, enjoying unparalleled military, economic and cultural pre-eminence in the world. This, he argues, is a surprisingly uncomfortable and potentially dangerous spot to occupy - one that requires tact and diplomacy, together with the quiet exercise of strength of the kind that has not been accorded in the past to the Middle East.

The disastrous consequences of diplomatic failure can be seen in the wreckage of the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Of course, Kissinger would have rather been proved wrong than see America mourn its dead. Yet, as we talked on the morning after the devastating attack on his countrymen, it was clear his mind was racing ahead to the foreign policy challenge Bush now faces.

"We've got a big immediate problem," he admitted. "We've got to take care of the wounded, restore services and allow time for grieving. We also have to find out who did this. An attack on this scale needs a base, an organisation that is

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The Sunday Times: Terrorism

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capable of carrying it out. We've got to make their survival or functioning impossible.

"If we are determined enough, this 'war' doesn't need to escalate. Nobody is going to confront America head on. The terrorists have already made our lives a misery. You can't stop their attacks, but you can make it more costly and difficult for them."

Hawkish talk, but Kissinger is not just referring to military retaliation. In his view that is only part of the answer, perhaps the least significant part. "I'd go after the terrorists with military measures," he said firmly. "If we can't get an intelligence service that knows about these organisations, we need a new service."

Tough-guy reactions, though, do not solve long-term problems. "When buildings are destroyed and civil life comes to an end, you've had action taken against the very essence of society. This is not just about the World Trade Center going down. If we don't surmount the problem, we will be guaranteed more tense situations in the future," he said.

It is his belief that Americans have ignored the rest of the world at their peril. Since the cold war, politicians have become more obsessed than ever with domestic politics; there are no votes abroad.

Kissinger wants his countrymen to stop and think about foreign affairs for a change. "The USA may be at the height of its powers, but we need to define our national purposes. We used to be confident of our place in the world. Now there's no consensus about what the danger is."

The experience of conflict and reconstruction defined the post-war political mood. Americans emerged victorious with an enduring sense of themselves as the "good guys" - fighting the Nazis in the 1940s and the communists after that. The New Deal, which pump-primed the American economy after the Depression, was replicated on an international scale by the Marshall Plan and war-torn Europe was rebuilt. After so many years of self-congratulation, it is puzzling for Americans to know they are regarded with such hatred in some parts of the world that the atrocities of the past week were greeted with cheers.

While America is united in the face of tragedy, Kissinger argues that it lost some of its sense of values and direction long ago.

"This consensus started to fall apart after Vietnam, when we tried to apply the same principles in Asia as we'd applied in Europe," he said. With hindsight, he believes it was a mistake for America to enter the Vietnam war. "I was not an Asia expert at the time, but I was not uncomfortable with the decision to go in. I assumed the government knew what it was doing." But it had no get-out plans nor vision of what

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exactly it thought it could achieve.

Newsweek recently published a memo from President Nixon to Kissinger, which Nixon's biographer, Richard Reeves, has just unearthed. It asked starkly: "Is it possible we were wrong from the start about Vietnam?"

Kissinger now believes "we" were. Although he claimed "Nixon wrote a lot of memos that reflected the mood of the moment and I can't remember this particular one", he conceded: "It's not a wrong question. I think we were wrong from the start."

It is a surprising statement, given that he is being harried by demonstrators in America and elsewhere for war crimes against the Vietnamese and Cambodian peoples, with the Chileans, East Timorese and others thrown in for good measure. He has been targeted by the left as the American version of General Pinochet, to be given no rest until he is hauled before the courts. He finds the comparison offensive. "I don't consider myself in the same category. It's an easy thing to attack me because I'm not a politician any more. It's the mentality of a new inquisition."

He remains, at 78, what he always was: the master of realpolitik. Americans are too eager to believe that "our institutions are universally applicable immediately. It has always been said that I only emphasise power, but that's not true. Without recognition of the realities of the world you cannot be effective, but without a moral compass you cannot find your way through the dilemmas that foreign policy throws up".

The simple foreign policy decisions are made low down the political food chain. Presidents have the responsibility of making the 51%-49% decisions. "If you require a great man in every generation, then you are overstretching your society," said Kissinger. "The great achievement of British foreign policy in the 19th century was that it had a relatively high standard of performance, which it was able to keep for generations."

To his mind, events in Kosovo back up this thesis that doing what might appear to be the right thing - intervening on behalf of those seeking independence from Serbia - can have disastrous consequences and create "more long-term problems than a more measured approach would have done".

The muddled approach of past administrations to the Middle East has now turned out to have the most terrible consequences of all. The Middle Eastern arena is no place, argues Kissinger, to play at foreign politics. The first was to let Saddam Hussein remain in power and then fail to keep him "in his box".

As a result, the sanctions regime is in tatters, the United Nations inspection of weapons has collapsed and Saddam,

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The Sunday Times: Terrorism

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who may be collaborating with the perpetrators of last
week's hijackings and crashes, "faces no obstacle to the
production of weapons of mass destruction".

Another costly mistake was to misunderstand the
incompatible objectives of the Palestinians and Israelis
when the Oslo peace agreement was signed in 1993.

"The dream of Israeli doves," writes Kissinger, "has been
that they might live with their Arab neighbours as, say,
Belgium and Holland do with each other.

"But the majority of Arab doves - Palestinians especially - think of peace not as fulfilment, but as acquiescence in facts they are powerless to change." Given the chance, he believes, the Palestinians not only want the West Bank and Jerusalem, but also historic towns such as Jaffa in their hands.

If the attacks on America last week were in part the result of
these catastrophic failures of comprehension, it is all the
more reason, said Kissinger, to act decisively now to quash
the terrorists and build up good relations with countries that
might otherwise join the ranks of America's enemies.

A case in point is China. Kissinger believes China is vitally
important - he was about to travel there when the terrorists
struck on Tuesday. "China is not a military threat to us
today and it's tied to us economically. So the question is:
are we going to try to prevent what might happen in 25
years if we decide on a policy of confrontation?

"China has had a 10% growth rate for the past 40 years. No other country has ever achieved that. If we seek to refuse its capacity to grow, there will be a confrontation. That is a very unwise course. We could end up stimulating Chinese nationalism without managing to inhibit significantly its economic growth."

Relations with Europe are another potential thorn. Kissinger
has been watching with some alarm the increasing anti-
Americanism shown by European Union member states.
"Economically, Europe and America are growing closer
together. But the image of America in many European
countries is one of unfettered, unfeeling capitalism. It's a
very strong trend in France and, to some extent, in
Germany," he said.

As European countries get closer, the more the EU could
end up distancing itself from America, according to
Kissinger. In this instance, tact is called for, not a display of
might. Sometimes it is in America's interest to pretend there
are other superpowers in the world even when there are
none that come close to challenging it.

It is too late now, though, to appease the terrorists.
"America has to learn how to get tough. It's not a question
of blaming anyone. We are in a new type of warfare. The

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This is no time for jokes, but sometimes they go to the heart of the matter. Henry **Kissinger**, America's former national security adviser and secretary of state, knows just such a one. "In the second world war, somebody asked how to solve the submarine problem.

**Published:** 16 September 2001

The elder Statesman

Henry **Kissinger** first became US secretary of state in 1973. It is a tribute to his stamina, if nothing else, that as he approaches his 80th birthday almost three decades later, he remains a colossus of American diplomacy, a man whose views may often be reviled, but who simply can't be ignored.

**Section:** BOOKS **Published:** 2 September 2001

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The Sunday Times: Books:

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September 2 2001

BOOKS

The elder Statesman

E-MAIL US

Motherhood - A
Life's Work: On
Becoming a
Mother by
Rachel Cusk

Henry Kissinger first became US secretary of state in 1973. It is a tribute to his stamina, if nothing else, that as he approaches his 80th birthday almost three decades later, he remains a colossus of American diplomacy, a man whose views may often be reviled, but who simply can't be ignored.

The breadth of his learning, as amply exposed in his new book, Does America Need a Foreign Policy?, is daunting. The book is subtitled Toward a Diplomacy for the 21st Century, but it might equally be labelled A History of the World, Part 13 (he has already published a dozen volumes on similar themes).

DOES AMERICA NEED
A FOREIGN POLICY?
by Henry Kissinger
Simon & Schuster £20
pp352

TONY ALLEN-MILLS

Henry
Kissinger

• BUY THIS BOOK •

From the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648, past the Ottoman empire, the Boer war and the Bolshevik revolution to China, Camp David and Kosovo, Kissinger sweeps down the cobwebbed corridors of international diplomacy to deliver a thunderous knock at President George W Bush's front door. Pay attention, Dubya, he says, not unkindly. Here's what you need to know about how to run the world.

Bush could certainly do worse than to thumb through a couple of chapters. Whatever anyone thinks of Kissinger - and the trend, of late, has not been flattering - nobody has ever accused him of lacking an opinion. His view of the world encompasses not only the great ideological and practical debates of the age, from the collapse of communism to the arrival of the internet, but also the nitty-grittiest issues of modern international diplomacy, from plans for a European Rapid Reaction Force to problems with agriculture in North Korea.

Kissinger surveys all these subjects through a seemingly bottomless glass of intellectual aplomb, and it is a shame he spoils the effect by an ill-advised diversion in a self-serving final chapter into the controversy over Augusto Pinochet, the former Chilean dictator who was detained in Britain on human rights charges.

Kissinger complains that governments are being subjected to the "tyranny of judges" and that international courts

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The Sunday Times: Books:

Books:

Diplomacy by Henry Kissinger
(Pocket Books £14.99)

His ideas about diplomacy and
power balances

to writing sentences such
as: "Fate has propelled a
nation convinced of the
universal applicability of a
single set of maxims into
a world characterised by

a multiplicity of historical evolutions requiring selective
strategies." Eh?) The problem is that Bush and his Texan
wrecking crew are showing few signs of attention.

At one point in an early chapter, Kissinger acknowledges
that "the very range and variety of international systems
receives much of the traditional American debate about the
nature of international politics somewhat irrelevant".

In an age when domestic concerns rule American political
debate ("It's the economy, stupid") and when polls show
that most Americans couldn't care less about foreign policy,
even Kissinger's weighty analysis is in danger of sinking
into irrelevance.

Available at the Sunday Times Books Direct price of £18
plus 99p p&p on 0870 165 8585 or click here

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