Henry Kissinger

      Date of birth: 27 May 1923

      In a nutshell: The shadow behind most of the evil thrones in the last fifty years

      Connected to: Everyone

      ‘Why do they hate us?’ ask the pundits on American right-wing TV and talk radio. They generally quickly answer that it’s because they are ‘jealous of our freedoms and lifestyle’. Poor benighted foreigners see hamburgers, Ford Mustangs and Miley Cyrus videos and can’t help but go foaming crazy in frustration and rage. You would too if all you had were sand, mullahs and posters of your Dear Leader.

      But there’s a simpler explanation for all the anti-American feeling in the world: Henry Kissinger. People hate the USA because of Henry Kissinger, the things he did, the things he made other people do and the long shadow he has cast ever since serving as Secretary of State under Presidents Nixon and Ford in the 1970s.

      That may sound like exaggeration – but it’s actually a challenge to overstate Kissinger’s influence. If there’s anything in the world that’s currently scaring, annoying or killing people, chances are that Kissinger’s somewhere in the mix. He was the one who first encouraged Pakistan to use radical Islam to destabilise Soviet-leaning forces in Afghanistan, and so unleash a worldwide wave of jihad. It was his diplomacy that helped ensure the USA would become reliant on Saudi oil. He made sure that the USA started to sell serious military hardware to the sheikhs. He helped lock in Israel’s veto over US policy in the Middle East. He made sure the US abandoned its Kurdish allies to Saddam Hussein in Iraq. Kissinger armed and propped up the Shah of Iran, trained his notorious secret police, and paved the way for the 1979 Islamic revolution. He first encouraged China to open up to market capitalism. He even caused trouble in Syria that would come home to roost decades later when he infuriated Hafez al-Assad by encouraging Egypt to sign a separate peace deal with Israel to one he’d told Assad he’d been working on. Assad told Kissinger that his actions would ‘release demons hidden under the surface of the Arab world’. Which turned out to be putting it mildly.

      It’s also hard to overstate the brutal nature of the realpolitik he pursued. One of his most notorious war crimes was to conspire with Nixon to prolong the Vietnam War for five pointless and bloody years in order to help Tricky Dicky win the White House. As the war went on, Kissinger oversaw the bombing of both Cambodia and Laos, directly causing (by his own estimation) around 50,000 deaths and ushering the nightmare rule of the Khmer Rouge* in the process.

      In 1973, after he signed a peace treaty whose terms were almost exactly the same as the one he helped scupper in 1968, he was awarded a Nobel Peace Prize.

      ‘I deeply cherish this honour,’ said Kissinger.

      ‘Political satire has become obsolete,’ said the comedian Tom Lehrer.

      1973 was a bumper year for Kissinger. While he was winning the Nobel Peace Prize, he was also ensuring General Pinochet deposed Salvador Allende, the President of Chile, in a brutal coup. Soon Pinochet’s junta, many of them now paid contacts of the CIA and US military, were murdering opponents in football stadiums, wrecking the economy and wiping out democratic resistance. Kissinger liked this situation so much he pulled a similar trick in Argentina, helping to make sure Isabel Perón was deposed and that the military were quickly engaged in the disappearance of thousands of dissidents and innocents there too.

      By this time, Kissinger was also getting involved in Indonesia. When he was visiting the country with President Ford, Indonesia’s corrupt military dictator Suharto told Kissinger he was planning to invade East Timor. Kissinger told Suharto he wouldn’t object so long as it was done ‘fast’ – and that the invasion should be delayed until he got back to Washington. Suharto waited for one day. The following war lasted six years between 1975 and 1981. It’s been estimated that a quarter of the local population died.