The Trial of Henry Kissinger by Christopher Hitchens Read Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Christopher Hitchens
McGeorge Bundy and William Colby, have since offered varieties of apology or contrition or at least explanation: Henry Kissinger never.
General Taylor described the practise of air strikes against hamlets suspected of "harboring"
Vietnamese guerrillas as "flagrant violations of the Geneva Convention on Civilian Protection, which prohibits 'collective penalties' and 'reprisals against protected persons' and equally in violation of the Rules of Land Warfare." He was writing before this atrocious precedent had been extended to "reprisal raids" that treated two whole countries - Laos and Cambodia - as if they were disposable hamlets.
For Henry Kissinger, no great believer in the boastful claims of the war-makers in the first place, a special degree of responsibility attaches. Not only did he have good reason to know that field commanders were exaggerating successes and claiming all dead bodies as enemy soldiers - a commonplace piece of knowledge after the spring of 1968 - but he also knew that the issue of the war had been settled politically and diplomatically, for all intents and purposes, before he became National Security Advisor. Thus he had to know that every additional casualty, on either side, was not just a death but an avoidable death. And with this knowledge, and with a strong sense of the domestic and personal political profit, he urged the expansion of the war into two neutral countries - violating international law - while persisting in a breathtakingly high level of attrition in Vietnam itself.
From a huge range of possible examples, I have chosen cases which involve Kissinger directly and in which I have myself been able to interview surviving witnesses. The first, as foreshadowed above, is Operation Speedy Express.
My friend and colleague Kevin Buckley, then a much-admired correspondent and Saigon bureau chief for Newsweek , became interested in the "pacification" campaign which bore this breezy code name. Designed in the closing days of the Johnson-Humphrey administration, it was put into full effect in the first six months of 1969, when Henry Kissinger had assumed much authority over the conduct of the war. The objective was the disciplining, on behalf of the Thieu government, of the turbulent Mekong Delta province of Kien Hoa.
On 22 January 1968, Defense Secretary Robert McNamara had told the Senate that "no regular North Vietnamese units" were deployed in the Mekong Delta, and no military intelligence documents have surfaced to undermine his claim, so that the cleansing of the area cannot be understood as part of the general argument about resisting Hanoi's unsleeping will to conquest. The announced purpose of the Ninth Division's sweep, indeed, was to redeem many thousands of villagers from political control by the National Liberation Front (NLF) or Viet Cong (VC). As Buckley found, and as his magazine Newsweek partially disclosed at the rather late date of 19 June 1972:
All the evidence I gathered pointed to a clear conclusion: a staggering number of noncombatant civilians - perhaps as many as 5,000 according to one official - were killed by US firepower to "pacify" Kien Hoa. The death toll there made the My Lai massacre look trifling by comparison...
The Ninth Division put all it had into the operation. Eight thousand infantrymen scoured the heavily populated countryside, but contact with the elusive enemy was rare. Thus, in its pursuit of pacification, the division relied heavily on its 50 artillery pieces, 50 helicopters (many armed with rockets and mini-guns) and the deadly support lent by the Air Force. There were 3,381 tactical air strikes by fighter bombers during "Speedy Express."...
"Death is our business and business is good," was the slogan painted on one helicopter unit's quarters during the operation. And so it was.
Cumulative statistics for "Speedy Express" show that 10,899 "enemy" were killed. In the month of March alone, "over 3,000 enemy troops were killed...which is the largest
General Taylor described the practise of air strikes against hamlets suspected of "harboring"
Vietnamese guerrillas as "flagrant violations of the Geneva Convention on Civilian Protection, which prohibits 'collective penalties' and 'reprisals against protected persons' and equally in violation of the Rules of Land Warfare." He was writing before this atrocious precedent had been extended to "reprisal raids" that treated two whole countries - Laos and Cambodia - as if they were disposable hamlets.
For Henry Kissinger, no great believer in the boastful claims of the war-makers in the first place, a special degree of responsibility attaches. Not only did he have good reason to know that field commanders were exaggerating successes and claiming all dead bodies as enemy soldiers - a commonplace piece of knowledge after the spring of 1968 - but he also knew that the issue of the war had been settled politically and diplomatically, for all intents and purposes, before he became National Security Advisor. Thus he had to know that every additional casualty, on either side, was not just a death but an avoidable death. And with this knowledge, and with a strong sense of the domestic and personal political profit, he urged the expansion of the war into two neutral countries - violating international law - while persisting in a breathtakingly high level of attrition in Vietnam itself.
From a huge range of possible examples, I have chosen cases which involve Kissinger directly and in which I have myself been able to interview surviving witnesses. The first, as foreshadowed above, is Operation Speedy Express.
My friend and colleague Kevin Buckley, then a much-admired correspondent and Saigon bureau chief for Newsweek , became interested in the "pacification" campaign which bore this breezy code name. Designed in the closing days of the Johnson-Humphrey administration, it was put into full effect in the first six months of 1969, when Henry Kissinger had assumed much authority over the conduct of the war. The objective was the disciplining, on behalf of the Thieu government, of the turbulent Mekong Delta province of Kien Hoa.
On 22 January 1968, Defense Secretary Robert McNamara had told the Senate that "no regular North Vietnamese units" were deployed in the Mekong Delta, and no military intelligence documents have surfaced to undermine his claim, so that the cleansing of the area cannot be understood as part of the general argument about resisting Hanoi's unsleeping will to conquest. The announced purpose of the Ninth Division's sweep, indeed, was to redeem many thousands of villagers from political control by the National Liberation Front (NLF) or Viet Cong (VC). As Buckley found, and as his magazine Newsweek partially disclosed at the rather late date of 19 June 1972:
All the evidence I gathered pointed to a clear conclusion: a staggering number of noncombatant civilians - perhaps as many as 5,000 according to one official - were killed by US firepower to "pacify" Kien Hoa. The death toll there made the My Lai massacre look trifling by comparison...
The Ninth Division put all it had into the operation. Eight thousand infantrymen scoured the heavily populated countryside, but contact with the elusive enemy was rare. Thus, in its pursuit of pacification, the division relied heavily on its 50 artillery pieces, 50 helicopters (many armed with rockets and mini-guns) and the deadly support lent by the Air Force. There were 3,381 tactical air strikes by fighter bombers during "Speedy Express."...
"Death is our business and business is good," was the slogan painted on one helicopter unit's quarters during the operation. And so it was.
Cumulative statistics for "Speedy Express" show that 10,899 "enemy" were killed. In the month of March alone, "over 3,000 enemy troops were killed...which is the largest
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