Here, then, is a perfect expression of American militarism's unbroken circle. Kissinger is invoking today's endless, open-ended war to justify what he did in Cambodia and Chile (and elsewhere) nearly half a century ago. But what he did nearly half a century ago created the conditions for today's endless wars. *
It's not so much that Kissinger's justification for bombing Cambodia set actual juridical precedents used by government lawyers to sanction today's global counterinsurgency campaign and drone strikes. Then, as now, legal rationales are often pasted on after the fact. It's more that by executing such an assault, and getting away with it, Kissinger provided a broad set of effective political arguments to justify war: when called on by Congress or the public to account for his actions, he invoked the right to self-defense, the effectiveness of his policies (“except” for being illegal, he asked the Pike Committee in 1975, “there is nothing wrong with my operation?”), and the need to deploy enough military force to establish credibility and achieve our political goals.
Perhaps the most influential argument Kissinger made to validate his war on Cambodia was the need to destroy enemy “sanctuaries.” Over and over again, while in office and out, he has insisted that bombing and cross-border raids were required to protect American lives (often, when doing so, greatly exaggerating the numbers of US soldiers killed: “500 Americans a week,” Kissinger said in 1991). 15 That argument was outside of the mainstream of international law in 1970, so much so it prompted Thomas Schelling's public break with Kissinger. Today, it is unquestioned. The goal of denying “safe haven” to terrorists is, write Micah Zenko and Amelia Mae Wolf in Foreign Policy , “the premise for the war in Afghanistan and for the expansion of drone operations into Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia. Most recently, it has underlined the rationale for initiating an open-ended war to degrade and destroy the Islamic State.” 16 As it did in Southeast Asia, the premise mystifies more than it clarifies, deflecting attention away from the fact that such aggressive militarism often worsens the problemâwhile turning the whole world into a battlefield. Fourteen years, and counting, at a cost of four trillion dollars, and counting, the global war on terror has acted as an accelerant, leaving behind a series of failed or failing states (among them, Iraq and Libya) and taking an organization, Al Qaeda, which had been mostly contained to Afghanistan, and transforming its cause into a worldwide danger.
It doesn't matter. “If you threaten America, you will find no safe haven,” Barack Obama has said, allowing Kissinger his retroactive absolution: Obama does it.
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There's a remark by Hannah Arendt in The Origins of Totalitarianism where she describes administrators of the British Empire as “monsters of conceit in their success and monsters of modesty in their failure.” Arendt is referring specially to the Empire's higher aristocratic officers, a new kind of imperialist who became one with the imperial system. Unlike older forms of conquest, European expansion starting in the late nineteenth century “was not driven by the specific appetite for a specific country but conceived as an endless process in which every country would serve only as a stepping-stone for further expansion.” The particular vices or virtues of these administrators mattered little, for “once he has entered the maelstrom of an unending process of expansion, he will, as it were, cease to be what he was and obey the laws of the process, identify himself with anonymous forces that he is supposed to serve in order to keep the whole process in motion; he will think of himself as mere function, and eventually consider such functionality, such an incarnation of the dynamic trend, his highest possible achievement.” 17
In a way, Kissinger achieved such a fusion between self and system; his personal ascendance became indistinguishable from the restoration of the imperial presidency, his personal success as exceptional as the nation he served. The melding is so complete that Kissinger can't imagine criticism of his policies as anything other than criticism of what he thinks America should be. “If we want to bring America together in the crisis that we face,” he recently said, “we should stop conducting these discussions as a civil war,” that is, stop trying to hold public officials responsible for the actions they take in the name of national defense.
Arendt said that imperial officials who have achieved such an overidentification of self and system “had to be perfectly willing to disappear into complete oblivion once failure had been proved, if for any reason they were no longer âinstruments of incomparable value,'” as London's consul general in Cairo called the bureaucrats who carry out a “policy of Imperialism.” Rarely, though, did Kissinger ever have to consider this fate. For a while in 1970, after the invasion of Cambodia, Kissinger, joking about the criticism he faced from former Harvard colleagues, talked about quitting the White House and joining the faculty at Arizona State. He seemed resigned, one reporter said, “to finishing his teaching career in the academic boondocks.” 18 But Kissinger evolved and adapted, surviving the Cambodia hearings, Watergate, and the Church Committee investigation, never losing his incomparable value, especially when it came to justifying war.
Far from disappearing into oblivion, he endures. And after Kissinger himself is gone, one imagines Kissingerism will endure as well.