It was no surprise that when US vassals like Karzai and Uribe were commanded to meet with Sarah Palin, Kissinger turned up as well. Nothing says "foriegn policy wonk" like rubbing up against Henry Kissinger. He's like a lucky rabbit's foot for Palin. Henry doesn't get as much press as he would like these days. So in that sense he needed the work. As the saying goes, there's no whore like and old whore. How he must loathe George Bush and his neo-con cronies with their talk of empire and their utter incompetence. There are so many bad things you can say about Kissinger, but incompetence doesn't quite make the top 10. Call it a strong 11. Unlike Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeldt who raised great-power incompetence to a level not seen since the Romanovs.
Kissinger won a Nobel Peace Prize for ending the Vietnam War. A prize he richly deserved. But only if by peace you mean a futile war of aggression against Cambodia with lots of civilian casualties. And by deserved you mean that the man had so much blood on his hands, he couldn't hold a pen to endorse the back of his prize money cheque from the Nobel Foundation. I hope he's still too scared of arrest to visit anywhere in Europe or South America. England is safe as long as Margaret Thatcher is alive. But he has to tread carefully elsewhere. Augusto Pinochet's arrest in Spain scared the bejeezus out of Kissinger and his partners in crime. There are warrants out for his arrest in multiple countries. He's guilty of both war crimes and crimes against humanity. There may have been crimes worse in severity (Bosnia) or in scale (Congo), but none since the second world war equal Kissinger's crimes in terms of cynicism. Citizens of Chile, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Argentina, Angola and East Timor were denied their freedom or their lives by Kissinger.
Kissinger is the reason why I agree with America's otherwise quaint constitutional provision against foreign-born presidents. A Bismark wannabe, he ended up more like Metternich. Any relevance to world affairs is at this point coincidental. His only use now is as a stick McCain and Obama can use to whack each other. The great Henry Kissinger is no more useful than an axe handle. Fitting. It's how he should be remembered.
