PRESIDENT BUSH'S SECRET ADVISOR

As more U.S. soldiers die in Iraq, and the President tells friends he will stay the course even if his only supporters are his wife ands their dog, Barney, news has leaked out that he is getting advice from a man who knows all about failure. That man is Henry Kissinger, 88, who served as National Security Advisor and Secretary of State under President Nixon, and as Sec. of State under his successor, Gerald Ford.
According to Washington Post editor, Bob Woodward whose new book “State of Denial” is giving the White House a political headache of serious proportions, Kissinger, 83, has been advising President Bush behind the scenes for some time and is free to visit the White House when he chooses.
The presence of Kissinger within the Bush White House should be no surprise to those who have studied his political career, including his influence on the neoconservative movement and his prominence as a Bilderberger. His role as advisor to this president may help explain some of the president’s view about the war in Iraq and also some of his language. One of Kissinger’s favorite sayings is that “the absence of alternatives clears the mind marvelously.” In other words, never seek alternatives, or as he told some of the most notorious regimes during his stint as a national security advisor, “succeed and get the job done quickly.”
President Bush has consistently made it clear that he will stay the course in Iraq, nor matter what happens, and that any alternatives are unacceptable. Such an inflexible vision of foreign policy fits into the Kissinger thesis that the war in Vietnam was lost because America didn’t stay the course. According to Woodward, Kissinger compares the war Iraq to Vietnam and thinks he is fighting the war in Vietnam all over again, except that this time he intends to win it.
Kissinger has been around the Bush White House for years now but like his own dark political career, he has remained in the shadows. One of his acolytes was Paul Bremmer who was sent to Iraq, post the invasion, to put the country on a peaceful footing. Bremmer worked for Kissinger’s global consulting firm until 22001. In Iraq, he made the mistake of disbanding the Baath Party and the Iraqi army, leaving Shia militias, many of them with Iranian links, to fill the ranks of the new Iraqi army.
Kissinger has emerged from the background this year to make a series of statements furthering the neo-conservative agenda about rebuilding the Middle East and creating a new world order. He has been especially active in articulating views that dovetail with Israel’s perceptions of how America should develop its Middle East strategy. Born a German, of Jewish origin, Kissinger has made no secret of his support for Zionism and his close links to Israel. On September 3, he publicly declared that European nations should put aside their differences with the US because both sides were facing a possible “war of civilizations” that “dwarfed transatlantic mistrust left over from the war in Iraq.” Mankind was facing a “global catastrophe,” he warned, and that meant America and its allies had to start constructing a “new world order.”
If Kissinger’s past teaches anything about his “new world order” it is that he will get into bed with dictators and the cost of his policies in human lives lost will not mean too much to his sensibilities. A brief examination of his days as national security advisor and Secretary of State under presidents Nixon and Ford, confirm his taste for dirty, clandestine wars, as well as an ability to hide the truth from Congress and the American people.
In 1969, he advocated the secret “carpet” bombing of neutral Cambodia that led to the loss of half a million innocent lives and is believed to have contributed to the subsequent rise of the dictator, Pol Pot whose Khmer Rouge militias massacred millions in what became known as “the killing fields.” In 1973, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for peace for negotiating a ceasefire with North Vietnam, even though the war in Vietnam continued for another two years. The prize was shared with a North Vietnamese ceasefire negotiator who refused to accept it on the basis that the ceasefire was a failure. Kissinger did not turn up to receive the prize and had a US ambassador pick it up for him. Many influential people across the globe have since argued that he should never have been given the Nobel Prize and that the Nobel organization was discredited when it awarded it to him.
If Cambodia was an example of his ability to operate in the shadows so was his support for the invasion of East Timor by the corrupt Indonesian regime of General Suharto. Documents have now surfaced showing that a day before the invasion on December 7, 1975, Kissinger told the dictator: “It is important whatever you do, do succeed quickly.” Kissinger was concerned American public opinion would not favor a brutal or prolonged occupation of East Timor that nine days earlier had declared independence from Portugal. The invasion led to the death of almost a quarter of a million Timorese and a subsequent occupation killed almost a third of the population in what Amnesty International called genocide.
But, most critics of Kissinger point to his support for some of the most brutal regimes in the Americas and in particular for “Operation Condor” which was a campaign of kidnapping, torture and murder in Chile, Argentina, Paraguay, Bolivia, Brazil. In 2,000, the Chilean authorities de-classified a cable dating to 1978 that showed that South American intelligence services, involved in a dirty war period that claimed tens of thousands of lives, talked to each other through a US communications channel based in Panama.
In May 2001, Kissinger was in the Ritz Hotel in Paris when a French judge, Roger Le Loire, served him with a summons requiring him to face questioning over the disappearances of French citizens during Operation Condor. Rather than answer the summons, Kissinger left Paris. The French are not the only people anxious to talk to him. The Chilean Supreme Court this year angered the Bush administration by announcing it too wanted to interview Kissinger about his connections to the now disgraced former Chilean dictator, General Pinochet. Judges in Argentina would also like to talk to him about the period when at least 30,000 people disappeared.
Kissinger is not a popular man in many countries across the globe though his consulting firm has connections to companies worldwide and to regimes like the Saudis. When the White House wanted him to lead a 9/11 investigation he backed off the offer, knowing his business links would be carefully scrutinized. When asked about who his clients were, he declined to answer though it was assumed they included companies in Saudi Arabia and Israel.
Kissinger has always kept his friends close, even when they were nasty dictators like Suharto and Pinochet. In a private conversation with Argentine’s foreign minister on October 7, 1976, while that regime was abducting and murdering its opponents, he told him, “I have an old-fashioned view that friends need to be supported……..We won’t cause you unnecessary difficulties. If you can finish before Congress gets back the better. Whatever freedoms you could restore would help.”
While Kissinger keeps a low profile and his ties to Dick Cheney and George Bush a secret, another man is busy in the shadows preparing to deliver his own bombshell about the background to the Iraq war and more. That man is the former CIA chief, George Tenet, who is busy writing his memoirs. By all accounts, he is livid that President Bush, Dick Cheney and Condoleezza Rice use him and the CIA as a political football when they are asked to justify why they used the WMD argument to invade Iraq. Recently Cheney repeated the familiar mantra that when the president asked Tenet if Saddam had weapons of mass destruction, Tenet replied “it’s a slam dunk, mister president.”
Now it seems Tenet is tiring of being kicked around and being used as a scapegoat. He is going top put the record straight and the Bush White House may well be in for a torrid time politically when he tells his side of the story next year. It would not take a rocket scientist to detect that Tenet talked to Bob Woodward for his book and that it was he, and some of his former CIA inner circle, that told Woodward about the meeting with Condi Rice two months before 9/11. The story goes that Tenet, along with Cofer Black, the State Department counter terrorism coordinator, went to see Rice and warned her about an impending Al Qaeda attack but she didn’t treat their warning seriously. Tenet may also finally address rumors that, before the Iraq war, Dick Cheney personally brow beat the CIA into delivering faulty intelligence and manipulating intelligence to bolster his case for going to war. There is no better man than Tenet to tell us if that happened since he was the man in charge of the CIA at the time. CIA officers past and present have always stood shoulder to shoulder in defending the CIA, not matter the cost to their own reputations. To date, Tenet has allowed the agency to be the fall guy for a failed Iraq war policy. Maybe he has decided it is time to stand up and be counted before the agency hangs him out to dry.