Kissinger

Quoted from Sandford1981

Edited.

I suppose at least he has the courage of his convictions no matter how much I disagree with him. It Would be easier to just Red Cross and move on.

Without the detail of the context, and not just the superficial and often wrong stuff on Wiki, how can we make a proper moral judgements? You may be very well read on US policy and political history, I'm not and I suspect most on the Fishy are not. I wrote on one of the other non-footie threads re. Israel / Hamas that to some Arthur Harris was a war criminal, but Churchill would have been fully backed the RAF campaign, so was Churchill the war criminal? We have a memorial in our own county to 56,000 RAF personnel who are treated (rightly IMO) as heroes but killed 600,000 German civilians, more than 10 times the deaths in the blitz, and were called “murder flyers” (Mordfliegern) by the Germans. On Kissinger, he could be a war criminal for his promotion of slaughters in Cambodia and South America, but did he also help prevent nuclear conflagration through detente with the Soviets and China and more slaughter in the Middle East by negotiating the end Yom Kippur, which could have spiralled out of control with the Soviet stepping in to back Egypt?

Quoted from Limerick Mariner

Without the detail of the context, and not just the superficial and often wrong stuff on Wiki, how can we make a proper moral judgements? You may be very well read on US policy and political history, I'm not and I suspect most on the Fishy are not. I wrote on one of the other non-footie threads re. Israel / Hamas that to some Arthur Harris was a war criminal, but Churchill would have been fully backed the RAF campaign, so was Churchill the war criminal? We have a memorial in our own county to 56,000 RAF personnel who are treated (rightly IMO) as heroes but killed 600,000 German civilians, more than 10 times the deaths in the blitz, and were called “murder flyers” (Mordfliegern) by the Germans. On Kissinger, he could be a war criminal for his promotion of slaughters in Cambodia and South America, but did he also help prevent nuclear conflagration through detente with the Soviets and China and more slaughter in the Middle East by negotiating the end Yom Kippur, which could have spiralled out of control with the Soviet stepping in to back Egypt?

As usual your points are reasonable, interesting and well made.
Admittedly I am no historian but I’d credit myself with a modicum of ability regards critical and independent thought. Whether that’s overstating my intelligence I don’t know but, I certainly don’t rely on Wikipedia for information.
One man’s terrorist is another’s freedom fighter is a rudimentary over generalisation but I use it as a loose frame of reference for this type of situation.
Of course context is absolutely key and it’s a very subjective and emotive area.
My contempt is never for those with boots on the ground doing their job but with the politicians who treat them as an expendable commodity and the innocent as collateral damage.

Quoted from Limerick Mariner

Without the detail of the context, and not just the superficial and often wrong stuff on Wiki, how can we make a proper moral judgements? You may be very well read on US policy and political history, I'm not and I suspect most on the Fishy are not. I wrote on one of the other non-footie threads re. Israel / Hamas that to some Arthur Harris was a war criminal, but Churchill would have been fully backed the RAF campaign, so was Churchill the war criminal? We have a memorial in our own county to 56,000 RAF personnel who are treated (rightly IMO) as heroes but killed 600,000 German civilians, more than 10 times the deaths in the blitz, and were called “murder flyers” (Mordfliegern) by the Germans. On Kissinger, he could be a war criminal for his promotion of slaughters in Cambodia and South America, but did he also help prevent nuclear conflagration through detente with the Soviets and China and more slaughter in the Middle East by negotiating the end Yom Kippur, which could have spiralled out of control with the Soviet stepping in to back Egypt?

This is a good post.

Kissinger's greatest legacy is the de-escalation of the nuclear threat. Statecraft and diplomacy requires ugly compromises (New Labour's 1997  'ethical foreign policy' disintegrated on contact with reality), but as pointed out by others Kissinger's brand of realpolitik led to terrible events.

If this sort of stuff is of interest, I'd recommend watching 'The Fog of War', a docu-film from about 20 years ago with Robert McNamara - US secretary of defense under Kennedy and Johnson. Sober reflections from an old man on lessons he learned from WW2, Cuba (the fine margin by which armageddon was averted) and Vietnam.