12 February, 2004
Springtime for Kissinger

Forgettable fact: Henry Kissinger spoke for the sane while the Bush Administration dreamed of conquering Iraq. When he and Madeleine Albright, President Clinton's Secretary of State, appeared before the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee on 26 September, 2002, Senator Russell Feingold asked their advice about managing the aftermath of an invasion, in which American troops might be endangered "for months on end." Dr. Albright attempted a cautiously analytical reply that deteriorated into incoherence and barely left her committed to the opinion that many factors remained unknown. Dr. Kissinger replied, in part, as follows:

I am bitterly opposed to a prolonged occupation of a Muslim country at the heart of the Muslim world by Western nations who proclaim the right to re-educate that country. That seems to me essentially a very difficult undertaking and therefore I would believe that that should be turned over to some kind of an international group that can be formed in which we would have a very major role. Therefore it's very difficult to talk about this in the abstract.

To appreciate those words fully, you need to have seen the look on the speaker's face. It was a look of appalled incredulity at the suggestion that anyone would try to do what President Bush has now been trying to do for almost a year. The latter words straggled out in that slow, circumspect way of Dr. Kissinger's when he's straining to let only his eyes speak of idiocy. He might have earned more credit if he'd simply stopped talking sooner. But in the darkness of a reputation such as his, even a little credit gleams like purest gold.

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