Opinion | Kissinger’s Dirty Work Abroad Hurt America at Home, Too

There has almost been too much to read since Henry Kissinger, the former national security adviser and secretary of state who served under Presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford, died on Wednesday. But I think the best obituaries and retrospectives on Kissinger have emphasized his paramount role in the spread of human misery across the globe, in the name of realpolitik and what he determined were America’s “national interests.”

Let’s start with Kissinger’s full participation, as Nixon’s national security adviser, in the decision to authorize the secret carpet bombing of Cambodia, during which the United States dropped more than 500,000 tons of explosives on the country, killing as many as 150,000 civilians. These bombings, which destabilized the country, played a role in the rise of Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge, who went on to kill approximately 2 million people during his four-year stint in power.

Kissinger was also an architect of the U.S. effort to undermine the democratically elected socialist government of Salvador Allende in Chile. In the wake of the 1973 coup d’état that installed Gen. Augusto Pinochet at the head of a military dictatorship, Kissinger also pushed the United States to back the new regime, which killed, tortured or imprisoned tens of thousands of Chileans.

“I think we should understand our policy — that however unpleasant they act, this government is better for us than Allende was,” Kissinger said to his deputies, according to declassified transcripts, in the weeks after the coup. A few years later, in 1976, Kissinger would tell Pinochet, “My evaluation is that you are a victim of all left-wing groups around the world and that your greatest sin was that you overthrew a government which was going Communist.”

Kissinger’s dirty work went far beyond Southeast Asia and South America. Along with Nixon, he backed the brutal effort of the military government of the former West Pakistan to suppress Bengali nationalists in the former East Pakistan, in what is now Bangladesh. A recent study estimated the death toll in that conflict at 269,000 people, with millions of refugees pushed into neighboring India. Kissinger also gave the green light to the Indonesian dictator Suharto’s 1975 invasion of East Timor, sparking a conflict that would, between 1976 and 1980, go on to kill at least 100,000 people out of a total population of approximately 650,000.

This is just a sampling of Kissinger’s activities, which would continue in the decades after he left government, when he worked as a private consultant and guru, of sorts, for a wide variety of political and business leaders. “No former national security adviser or secretary of state has ever wielded as much as influence after leaving office as Kissinger,” the historian Greg Grandin notes in his obituary for The Nation. That influence explains why, as Spencer Ackerman observes in Rolling Stone, Kissinger “died a celebrity,” a valued and feted member of the American establishment.