Am I making a case on whom the secret dictator shoe would fit best?
Christopher Hitchens continues:
We know from other sources that Kissinger was not only a micromanager with an eye to detail, but a man with a taste for intervention and rapid response.
In the White House memoir of one of his closest associates, Nixon's chief of staff H.R. Haldeman, we learn of an occasion when Kissinger nearly precipitated a crisis because he became excited by some aerial photographs of Cuba. (The pictures showed soccer fields under construction, which he took-believing the Cubans to be exclusively interested in baseball-as the sign of a new and sinister Russian design.)
Kissinger: “Coronavirus will forever alter the world order.”
The link is here.
On another occasion, following the downing of a US plane, he was in favor of bombing North Korea and not excluding the nuclear option.
The Ends of Power was Haldeman's title; it is only one of many testimonies showing Kissinger's unsleeping attention to potential sources of trouble, and therefore of possible distinction for himself.
This is a necessary preface to a consideration of his self-exculpation in the Cyprus matter, an apologia which depends for its credibility on our willingness to believe that Kissinger was wholly incompetent and impotent and above all uninformed.
The energy with which he presses this self-abnegating case is revealing. It is also important, because if Kissinger did have any knowledge of the events he describes, then he is guilty of collusion in an assassination attempt on a foreign head of state, in a fascist military coup, in a serious violation of American law (the Foreign Assistance Act, which prohibits the use of US military aid and materiel for non-defensive purposes), in two invasions which flouted international law, and in the murder and dispossession of many thousands of noncombatant civilians.
In seeking to fend off this conclusion, and its implications, Kissinger gives one hostage to fortune in Years of Upheaval and another in Years of Renewal.
In the former volume he says plainly, “I had always taken it for granted that the next intercommunal crisis in Cyprus would provoke Turkish intervention," that is, it would at least risk the prospect of a war within NATO between Greece and Turkey and would certainly involve the partition of the island.
That this was indeed common knowledge may not be doubted by any person even lightly acquainted with Cypriot affairs. In the latter volume, where he finally takes up the challenge implicitly refused in the former, he repeatedly asks the reader why anyone (such as himself, so burdened with Watergate) would have sought “a crisis in the Eastern Mediterranean between two NATO allies."
These two disingenuous statements need to be qualified in the light of a third, which appears on page 199 of Years of Renewal. Here, President Makarios of Cyprus is described without adornment as "the proximate cause of most of Cyprus's tensions."
President Makarios
Makarios was the democratically elected leader of a virtually unarmed republic, which was at the time an associate member of the European Economic Community (EEC), the United Nations and the Commonwealth.
His rule was challenged, and the independence of Cyprus was threatened, by a military dictatorship in Athens and a highly militarized government in Turkey, both of which sponsored right-wing gangster organizations on the island, and both of which had plans to annex the greater or lesser part of it.
The Davos clique is very worried about “security”.
The link is here.
In spite of this, "intercommunal" violence had been on the decline in Cyprus throughout the 197Os. Most killings were in fact "intramural": of Greek and Turkish democrats or internationalists by their respective nationalist and authoritarian rivals.
Several attempts, by Greek and Greek-Cypriot fanatics, had been made on the life of President Makarios himself.
To describe his person as "the proximate cause" of most of the tensions is to make a wildly aberrant moral judgment.
This same aberrant judgment, however, supplies the key that unlocks the lie at the heart of Kissinger's presentation.
If the elected civilian authority (and spiritual leader of the Greek Orthodox community) is the "proximate cause" of the tensions, then his removal from the scene is self-evidently the cure for them.
“With the international order in place since World War II.” The link is here.
If one can demonstrate that there was such a removal plan, and that Kissinger knew about it in advance, then it follows logically and naturally that he was not ostensibly looking for a crisis-as he self-pityingly asks us to disbelieve-but for a solution.
The fact that he got a crisis, which was also a hideous calamity for Cyprus and the region, does not change the equation or undo the syllogism.
A syllogism is a kind of logical argument that applies deductive reasoning to arrive at a conclusion based on exactly two propositions that are asserted or assumed to be true.
PROBLEM REACTION SOLUTION
It is attributable to the other observable fact that the scheme to remove Makarios, on which the "solution" depended, was in practice a failure.
But those who willed the means and wished the ends are not absolved from guilt by the refusal of reality to match their schemes.
It is, from Kissinger's own record and recollection, as well as from the record of the subsequent official inquiry, quite easy to demonstrate that he did have advance knowledge of the plan to depose and kill Makarios.
He admits as much himself, by noting that the Greek dictator Dimitrios Ioannides, head of the secret police, was determined to mount a coup in Cyprus and bring the island under the control of Athens.
“Globalism 4.0 - and how it could benefit us all.”
The link is here.
This was one of the better-known facts of the situation, as was the more embarrassing fact that Brigadier Ioannides was dependent on US military aid and political sympathy.
His police state had been expelled from the Council of Europe and blocked from joining the EEC, and it was largely the advantage conferred by his agreement to “home port" the US Sixth Fleet, and host a string of US air and intelligence bases, that kept him in power.
This lenient policy was highly controversial in Congress and in the American press, and the argument over it was part of Kissinger's daily bread long before the Watergate drama.