Or we're made to forget. Already forgetting what Bush did.

Good question indeed.

Gonna miss him.

And that old war criminal Kissinger is still alive. The universe is not a just place.

Kissinger is. A warmongering piece of SHIT. The Nobel prize? There goes any credibility there.

Bourdain was right.

her friendship with Kissinger deeply bothered me. I didn’t understand it and I thought less of her for it.

than Justin Trudeau is with DT.

with a previous Secretary of State, and it was her job to promote Obama's goals. That meant getting along as well as she could with GOP people in Congress and in previous administrations.

and the Kissingers were friends with the de la Rentas. Big deal.

I'm just saying it's ridiculous to claim the relationship between Kissinger and Clinton is similar to the relationship between Trump and Trudeau.

And Mother Jones isn't the most unbiased source of analysis on Clinton.

But you know, "Clinton Rules" makes anything she does suspect, and unprecedented.

Especially when she behaves like a diplomat.

It's as bad as Obama Derangement Syndrome sometimes...

as a diplomat, to be diplomatic with everyone -- including the previous secretaries of state.

I didn't say it wasn't.


But this part here ------> "no more friends with him than Justin Trudeau is with DT"


is not true.

Because I don't. He's being diplomatic. I can't believe there is a person in the world who genuinely considers Trump to be a friend out of anything but expedience.

Despite all the shit we've been throwing in Canada's direction.

Option A: She's being diplomatic. However, that's pretty bad diplomacy. There are much better ways to say nice things about him than flattering him as "just and liberal".

Option B: She actually thinks he's "just and liberal." Which is, well, f***ked up.

Her actual words. But those are inconvenient so..

I'd be interested in seeing an analogous photo:

https://goo.gl/images/Bt8Zrv|

Cozying-up to war criminals is wrong, even when a major Democratic politician does it.

-app

She should have walked away from Kissinger many, many times.

Fuck Kissinger -

'Although I supported Hillary,
her friendship with Kissinger deeply bothered me. I didn’t understand it and I thought less of her for it.'

And that's not bashing a 'Democratic figure', that's a true statement of your feelings.

He's a corrupt war criminal, in my opinon. My skin crawls when I see pictures of him at glittering black tie events where he's treated like royalty. Disgusting!

I smell sulphur every time I see him popping up somewhere. Bet he has goat legs under those tuxedo pants.

A friend of mine and I were watching some of the Parts Unknown marathon tonight and the Vietnam episode (with President Obama) was on. Anthony quoted something that Westmoreland said (about the Vietnamese) that was simply despicable. I don't remember the exact quote but in essence it was that people from other countries aren't worth very much.

By suicide of course. Okay.

Why does evil never seem to die? All of these old, evil republican bastards seem to live long past their natural expiration date. Kissinger should have kicked off 20 years ago.

RIP Anthony Bourdain. The world needs more people like you in it.

Kissinger is an evil fuck but many persons here at DU defend American foreign policy.
I could also post pics with Kissinger and Democratic bigwigs.

I do wonder if how people everywhere are talking about the US post-Trump added to Bourdain's depression.

Al Franken overheard the phonecall and yelled loud enough for Kissinger to hear: Tell Mr. Kissinger he can have the tickets if he apologizes for bombing Cambodia.

Most of the country was not touched. What really destroyed Cambodia, and strangely AB is silent on in the excerpt, is Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge. Pot murdered up to 2 million of his own people in the 1975-79 period, while the U.S. (and other countries) turned their eyes away. Or worse, they said it was not happening. Anyone with the slightest education was murdered.

I have been to Cambodia three times. The first time, in 1992, when the Khmer Rouge were still fighting, I noticed the people were very dull. It was clear the Pot genocide had drastically affected the average intelligence of the population. On my last visit several years ago people were significantly brighter as new generations are rapidly increasing in average intelligence.

That is the real problem and cause of the situation in Cambodia.

by a military coup, supported if not instigated by the US while Kissinger was Secretary of State?

And didn't that military junta crack down on all opposition, leaving only the most violent opposition groups (like the Khmer Rouge) intact? It reminds me of what JFK once said, "Those who make peaceful protest impossible make violent revolution inevitable."

And didn't the US and ARVN invade eastern Cambodia which, along with the bombing, created a refugee crisis that helped the Khmer Rouge insurgency?

Isn't it possible that, without US meddling in Southeast Asia the Khmer Rouge might never have been in a position to commit genocide?

It's convenient to try to draw a neat divide between US intervention in Southeast Asia, and the humanitarian disasters that occurred immediately after the US withdrawal. But generally speaking I'm not sure history is so cut and dried.

Added irony--I seem to recall that the Reagan administration recognized the Khmer Rouge as the legitimate representative of Cambodia, refusing to allow the government that succeeded it to be seated at the UN. The new government was installed after the Khmer Rouge was chased out of the cities by the military of the newly united Vietnam. Reagan so detested the Vietnamese for defeating the US that he preferred having a Khmer Rouge delegation in New York, as opposed to a government installed with the help of the Vietnamese.

US involvement in Southeast Asia, like French involvement before it, was a disaster from beginning to end. And Henry Kissinger prolonged that involvement--and in the worst possible way--for years after it was evident that the policy was flat out wrong from a moral standpoint and counterproductive even from the standpoint of US national security. He and Nixon prolonged US involvement and escalated and widened the war for no good reason other than to shore up American "credibility"--which ended up in tatters anyway.

Kissinger's tenure as National Security advisor and Secretary of State was one of the worst in history. Not only in Southeast Asia, but also in Latin America--the overthrow of the democratically elected government of Chile being the prime example. Chile is still recovering from the horror of Pinochet--a horror Kissinger was instrumental in inflicting. Even out of government his influence was nothing but baleful. It was Kissinger who urged President Carter to admit the Shah of Iran into the US for medical treatment, inciting the takeover of the US embassy in Tehran, leading to Reagan's election.

Kissinger is up there with Dick Cheney as a geo-political "expert." I wish the both of them could be held accountable for all the harm they've visited on the world.

The Khmer Rouge came into power in 1975 and were overthrown by the Vietnamese in 1979. Reagan did not take office until 1981. The U.S. policy during this period was to unite with a Chinese ally (Khmer Rouge) because China was fighting the Vietnamese at that point.

We can go back into history all we want and try to say "what if" the U.S. had not intervened in southeast Asia. But it did and let loose demons which will never be gotten back.

of supporting the Khmer Rouge, even after it was chased out of the government of Cambodia.

Just like the US for decades continued with the fiction that the government of Taiwan was the legal representative of mainland China long after 1949, Reagan continued the policy of supporting the Khmer Rouge delegates as the legitimate representatives of the people of Cambodia at the UN for years after the Khmer Rouge were driven from power. This even after news of the killing fields had reached the west (I give Ford a pass because, like the Holocaust, news of what was happening was initially slow to reach, and be believed by, the outside world).

Yes, we can "go back into history all we want"--and we should want to, in order to keep from repeating the same tragic mistakes. Had we learned the true lessons of Vietnam--that foreign interventions, especially invasions, almost always "let loose demons which will never be gotten back" we might not have been so eager to invade Iraq, which action released its own horde of demons, for instance the refugee catastrophe that destabilized Syria and threatens Lebanon and Jordan.

I made my post in particular in response to your comment about how progressives who criticize Kissinger don't often bring up the grotesque events that followed the bombing. I've seen the same point made by right wingers who cite the Khmer Rouge as an argument for why intervention in Vietnam was somehow justified, and how our "premature" withdrawal resulted in genocide.

My point is that none of that would have happened had we followed FDR's instinct on Southeast Asia, which was to oppose--or at any rate not support--the return of French (to Indochina) and British (to Malaysia) and Dutch (Indonesia) imperialists to that region. The Pentagon Papers revealed that Ho Chi Minh sent a message to Truman asking for US support for Vietnamese independence--in 1945. The Viet Minh at that point had been in an alliance with the OSS to wage a guerilla war against the Japanese, and it was a perfectly reasonable expectation on their part that that alliance should continue.

Instead we backed the French, and when they failed we intervened directly. This was the greatest American foreign policy blunder of the 20th century, second only to the US withdrawal from Europe in 1919-20.

We look right now to be on the verge of repeating all our worst mistakes. Refusing to acknowledge our history--and our responsibility for so much of what has gone wrong during "the American century" will only guarantee that we keep repeating those same mistakes, if not worse ones. The near beatification of Henry Kissinger by American media only gets in the way of any factual critique of why things in that region went so dreadfully wrong, and our role in making all that happen.

Why?

other than since the KR were only chased out in 1979, that meant they held onto their UN seat during the Carter administration until January 1981. Reagan continued the policy for another eight full years, during which time the atrocities were fully documented with the accounts receiving much broader coverage in the west.

But to the extent that Carter went along with this policy, I hold him accountable as well. Though he of course had nothing to do with American support for the French, American support for Diem, American support for the succession of thoroughly corrupt and repressive regimes from 63 to 75, the American bombing and invasion of Cambodia. Like President Obama, he inherited the messes left by previous administrations, and his tenure was largely one of dealing with the aftershocks of their failures, at home and abroad. Iran, for instance, was the culmination of American (and British) support for the overthrow of its democratically elected government, and subsequent support of the Shah. He tried to shift that policy, but it was too little, too late. People tend to resent spending decades under the rule of an oppressive tyranny supported by foreign powers.

I think Carter's biggest mistakes came from taking the advice of foreign policy "experts"--like Kissinger--at face value. His greatest achievements came when he bucked the accepted wisdom, as when he brokered the Camp David Accords. The shame is that he wasn't able to follow up on that as he'd planned. Camp David, he said at the time and afterwards, was intended to be the first step toward a comprehensive Arab-Israeli peace. This was before any of the settlements had been built, before the invasion of Lebanon and the first Intifada. There was the possibility for an actual two state settlement, but Reagan pretty much scuttled that idea. In that regard Reagan was a lot like Trump--anything Carter accomplished or proposed Reagan opposed almost as a reflex. Ripping the solar panels off the White House roof was just one particularly petty example.

A second Carter administration is another of those great what-ifs. What if Carter had declined Kissinger's advice, and refused to allow the Shah into the US? Possibly no Iran hostage crisis, and no opportunity for the Reagan campaign to collude with the Iranians and reach their infamous bargain--hang onto the hostages until after the election, in return we agree to ship you billions of dollars in arms. A possible comprehensive Mideast peace settlement. An early push for renewable energy with the concomitant easing of the climate change crisis. No Star Wars boondoggle. No support of Salvadoran death squads. No support of Contra attacks on Nicaragua. No Justice Scalia. And on and on and on.

So I tend to cut Carter some slack, seeing as how he's been so maligned for so long. On balance his administration accomplished quite a lot, given what they had to work with. Especially compared to the clowns and knaves directing our nation today.

and best wishes.

Unless of by “most of the country was not touched” you meant “many of the parts bordering Thailand.” I also suspect that “dull look in the eye” that you saw wasn’t stupidity, but an entire generation scarred by a war mostly enabled by US bombing. No US bombing, no Pol Pot, by the way. The two are directly, irrevocably corrected.

You made that up. I don't know what your graphic supposed to show but if it is bombing it simply is not true. The idea that Pol Pot would not exist absent U.S. bombing is ridiculous. Pot was a trained revolutionary and was backed by China which wanted to extend its influence in the region. They also wanted to counter Vietnam which has been an enemy of China for hundreds of years.

Nixon expanded the bombing range to include the entire country, and he did so secretly. You’re basically repeating lies concocted during the Nixon administration which were easily refuted when Clinton declassified the bombing coordinates in 2000.

http://www.taylorowen.com/Articles/06_GIS_Bombing_Analysis.pdf

Of course you're not moving the goalposts you initially erected. Your're simply ignoring their existence at this point.

I get it. It's a convenience we often dabble in to avoid admission.

As you say, no bombing, no Pol Pot.

was in connecting or exposing the American viewer to the people and cultures that make up the nations of the world, it was casual and intimate.

It wasn't focused on the one dimensional, monolithic portrayal of nations based on conflicts, political leaders or governments as is most often portrayed whether intentional or not by vast majority of the corporate media conglomerates.

I believe in this, many of if not most of the standard members of the CMCs greatly envied Anthony's role and abilities to circumvent myopic caricatures of peoples abroad and expose the American Nation to a more inclusive, familial point of view.




Thanks for the thread progressoid