Henry Kissinger, Hillary Clinton’s Tutor in War and Peace

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You can tell a lot about a person by seeing who their friends are.

Henry Kissinger, Hillary Clinton’s Tutor in War and Peace

(During debate), Clinton once again praised a man with a lot of blood on his hands.

By Greg Grandin
The Nation, Feb. 5, 2016

Clinton just can’t quit him. Even as she is trying to outflank Bernie on his left, Hillary Clinton can’t help but stutter the name of Henry Kissinger. Last night in the New Hampshire debate, Clinton thought to close her argument that she is the true progressive with this: “I was very flattered when Henry Kissinger said I ran the State Department better than anybody had run it in a long time.”

Let’s consider some of Kissinger’s achievements during his tenure as Richard Nixon’s top foreign policy–maker. He (1) prolonged the Vietnam War for five pointless years; (2) illegally bombed Cambodia and Laos; (3) goaded Nixon to wiretap staffers and journalists; (4) bore responsibility for three genocides in Cambodia, East Timor, and Bangladesh; (5) urged Nixon to go after Daniel Ellsberg for having released the Pentagon Papers, which set off a chain of events that brought down the Nixon White House; (6) pumped up Pakistan’s ISI, and encouraged it to use political Islam to destabilize Afghanistan; (7) began the US’s arms-for-petrodollars dependency with Saudi Arabia and pre-revolutionary Iran; (8) accelerated needless civil wars in southern Africa that, in the name of supporting white supremacy, left millions dead; (9) supported coups and death squads throughout Latin America; and (10) ingratiated himself with the first-generation neocons, such as Dick Cheney and Paul Wolfowitz, who would take American militarism to its next calamitous level. Read all about it in Kissinger’s Shadow!

SNIP...

 As first lady, Hillary Clinton spent the early months of her husband’s administration drafting healthcare-reform legislation, only to see it put on the back burner by the North American Free Trade Agreement. Kissinger, in his role as a global consultant, had played a critical role in bringing the various parties who would write that trade treaty together during the previous George H.W. Bush administration. Kissinger continued his NAFTA advocacy with Bill Clinton. As Jeff Faux writes in his excellent The Global Class War, Kissinger was “the perfect tutor” for Clinton, who was “trying to convince Republicans and their business allies that they could count on him to champion Reagan’s vision.”

By September 1993, Hillary’s healthcare bill was ready to be presented to the public and to Congress. But so was NAFTA. All of Kissinger’s allies in the White House, including Mack McLarty, who would soon join Kissinger Associates, pushed Clinton to prioritize NAFTA over healthcare. Clinton did. It was Kissinger who came up with the idea of having past presidents stand behind Clinton as he signed the treaty. Reagan was sick and Nixon still non grata, but “flanked by former presidents Bush, Carter and Ford at a White House ceremony, Mr. Clinton delivers an impassioned speech,” The Wall Street Journal reported. No such presidential backdrop was assembled to help support Hillary Clinton’s healthcare proposal. By August 1994, healthcare was dead.

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http://www.thenation.com/article/henry-kissinger-hillary-clintons-tutor-in-war-and-peace/

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