[A-List] US imperialism: "no whitewash at the White House"?

[Sabri Oncu <soncu@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

New York Times

December 1, 2002
He's Ba-a-ack!
By MAUREEN DOWD


WASHINGTON ? It's an inspired choice. Bold, counterintuitive,
edgy, outside the box.

Who better to investigate an unwarranted attack on America than
the man who used to instigate America's unwarranted attacks?

Who better to ferret out government duplicity and manipulation
than the man who engineered secret wars, secret bombings, secret
wiretaps and secret coups, and still ended up as a Pillar of the
Establishment and Nobel Peace Prize winner?

It was Dick Cheney's brainstorm, naturally. Only someone as
pathologically opaque as the vice president could appreciate the
sublime translucency of Henry Kissinger. And only someone intent
on recreating the glory days of the Ford and Nixon White Houses
could have hungered to add the 79-year-old Dr. Strange ? I mean,
Dr. Kissinger to the Bush team.

There will be naysayers who quibble that the president's choice
to lead the 9/11 commission is not so much a realist as an
opportunist, not so much Metternich as Machiavelli.

They will look askance at Mr. Kissinger's résumé: keeping the
Vietnam War going for years after he realized it might be
unwinnable; encouraging the illegal bombing of Cambodia; backing
Chile's murderous Pinochet; playing Iago to President Richard
Nixon, telling him he'd be "a weakling" if he did not prosecute
newspapers running the Pentagon Papers; wiretapping journalists
and his own colleagues to track down leaks on the Cambodia
bombing.

If you look for the words "Kissinger" and "secret" in the same
sentence in Nexis, the search cannot be completed; there are too
many results. When he was dating Jill St. John and Liv Ullmann
and preaching that power is an aphrodisiac, he even coyly called
himself "a secret swinger."

In Walter Isaacson's biography, "Kissinger," the same words
cascade: "deceitful," "disingenuous," "paranoid," "insecure,"
"temper tantrum," "flatterer," "two-faced" and "secretive." The
über-diplomat has even been criticized for dissembling in his own
memoirs. But secretiveness is not a disqualification for jobs in
this White House. Quite the contrary: only the clandestine and
the conspiratorial need apply.

Mr. Bush, after all, worked very hard to suppress any
investigation of 9/11. He had to cave to the victims' families,
who were hellbent to hear what the president learned in his
August 2001 briefing about Al Qaeda plans, and what wires were
crossed at the C.I.A., F.B.I. and I.N.S.

Now Mr. Bush can let the commission proceed, secure in the
knowledge that Mr. Kissinger has never shed light on a single
dark corner, or failed to flatter a boss, in his entire
celebrated career. (He was one of Mr. Bush's patient tutors in
foreign policy during the campaign.)

If you want to get to the bottom of something, you don't appoint
Henry Kissinger. If you want to keep others from getting to the
bottom of something, you appoint Henry Kissinger.

Mr. Bush learned about the diplomat's black belt in the black
arts long ago, when he made a patsy of Bush père. As the
ambassador to the U.N. in 1971, Bush 41 was accused of
aggressively making the case for Taiwan and against Beijing, even
as Mr. Kissinger, the national security adviser, was secretly
traveling to Beijing and undercutting Taiwan.

Afterward, Mr. Kissinger told George H. W. Bush he was
"disappointed" that Beijing had gotten Taiwan's seat in the U.N.
"Given the fact that we were saying one thing in New York and
doing another in Washington," Mr. Bush drily observed, "that
outcome was inevitable."

Fortunately, Bush Jr. was not held back by the revulsion that
many in his generation have for Mr. Kissinger's power-drunk
promotion of bloody American adventures abroad. As the former
fraternity president told GQ magazine, he stayed a retro 50's guy
through the roiling 60's: "I don't remember any kind of heaviness
ruining my time at Yale."

Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney are in tune with Mr. Kissinger's
principles: that the greatest enemy of U.S. policy is the U.S.
media, that American diplomacy may be happily indifferent to
American public opinion, that the great unwashed masses of our
democracy are just a big old drag on the elites who know what's
best, and that corporate pals are a help, not a hindrance, in
government work.

For this administration, outside the box is inside the box.

Article at:
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/01/opinion/01DOWD.html?todaysheadl
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