Henry Kissinger is dead at 100, his consulting firm alleges. Kissinger, as Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford’s secretary of state, directed U.S. foreign policy through the futile and bloody Vietnam War, stoked other conflicts that led to countless deaths, supported unambiguous war crimes in pursuit of American realpolitik, and served as the media’s post-war prototype for justifying atrocity and its perpetrators in the name of freedom.
[Vietnam] led to perhaps the most infamous crime Kissinger committed: a secret four-year bombing campaign in Cambodia that killed an untold number of civilians, despite the fact that it was a neutral nation with which the United States was not at war.
During his time in charge of the American foreign policy machine, Kissinger also directed illegal arms sales to Pakistan as it carried out a brutal crackdown on its Bengali population in 1971. He supported the 1973 military coup that overthrew a democratically elected socialist government in Chile, gave the go-ahead to Indonesia’s 1975 invasion of East Timor, and backed Argentina’s repressive military dictatorship as it launched its “dirty war” against dissenters and leftists in 1976. His policies during the Ford administration also fueled civil wars in Africa, most notably in Angola.
The magnanimous obituarial horseshit is already mounting, written as most of it was years ago, waiting for the special day. All that matters now, though, is that Liza Minelli outlived him [twitter.com].
