Kissinger and Bush

This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

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The bombshell in Bob Woodward’s latest book is supposedly the news of Henry Kissinger’s regular meetings with President Bush, and there will no doubt be a temptation among many of our friends who wonder what Mr. Bush has been thinking to attribute some of the hesitation to the influence of Mr. Kissinger. But experience has taught us that Mr. Bush makes his own decisions, and painting the president as a puppet of Mr. Kissinger is as much of an error as painting him as a pawn of Vice President Cheney.

Still, in his policy toward Iran, at least publicly, Mr. Bush has taken a line quite similar to that sketched by Mr. Kissinger in a July 31, 2006, opinion article in the Washington Post. Mr. Kissinger, writing exactly a month before a United Nations deadline on Iran’s nuclear program, referred to a two-year long diplomatic dance between America and Communist China before the opening to China under Nixon — two years of “subtle, reciprocal, symbolic and diplomatic actions.”

Mr. Kissinger advised, essentially, a diplomatic approach to Iran, writing, “Hard as it is to imagine that Iran, under its present president, will participate in an effort that would require it to abandon its terrorist activities or its support for such instruments as Hezbollah, the recognition of this fact should emerge from the process of negotiation rather than being the basis for a refusal to negotiate.”

How else to account for the fact that, nearly a month since the August 31 deadline, there have been no consequences for Iran because of its refusal to comply? To the contrary, Iran’s president was welcomed last week at the United Nations and at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York, and even this week the European Union’s foreign policy chief, Javier Solana, was meeting with the Iranian national security adviser, Ali Larijani. The Americans and Europeans could profit, in their dealings with Iran, from reading the dating-advice book “He’s Just Not That Into You.” The Iranians just aren’t that into a peace pact with the West, no matter how ardently the West pursues it.

There are, thankfully, increasing signs that Mr. Bush understands this. The House of Representatives, with reluctant administration approval, yesterday passed a bill supporting freedom and democracy in Iran. President Talabani of Iraq emerged from meetings with American officials in Washington to threaten Iraq’s neighbors that if they didn’t stop undermining the government of Iraq, “Iraqi people will support the opposition of other countries and try to make troubles for them as they have for us.” Yesterday, the Defense Department press service published a stunning account of a press briefing by Army Major General Richard Zahner, the deputy chief of staff for intelligence with Multinational Force Iraq, in which General Zahner said the Iranian government is funneling C-4 explosives and millions of dollars to Iraqi insurgents. General Zahner reportedly said the Iranian explosives were distinguishable by red labels identical to those found on explosives shipped by the Iranians to Hezbollah fighters targeting Israel.

The same piece in which Mr. Kissinger argued for diplomacy with Iran also compared the current moment to the response when Mussolini invaded Abyssinia. “By a vast majority, the League of Nations voted to treat the Italian adventure as aggression and to impose sanctions. But they recoiled before the consequences of their insight and rejected an oil embargo, which Italy would have been unable to overcome,” Mr. Kissinger wrote. “The league never recovered from that debacle. If the six-nation forums dealing with Iran and North Korea suffer comparable failures, the consequence will be a world of unchecked proliferation, not controlled by either governing principles or functioning institutions.”

These columns are less concerned with the consequences for the United Nations — today’s version of the failed League of Nations — than for the security of America and its allies in Israel and Iraq and India and even Europe, which Iran’s leaders hope to conquer for their extremist version of Islam. If the Iranians were to have not just C-4 and petrodollars at their disposal but a nuclear bomb, “debacle” would be an understatement as a description of the outcome. So far this year, the Iranians have broken the nuclear rules, started a war against Israel in Lebanon, and undermined with bombs a U.N.-endorsed American-backed project to bring freedom and democracy to Iraq. They have suffered no consequences whatsoever other than what appears to be an improved negotiating position on the nuclear issue. You don’t need three Harvard degrees and a Nobel prize like Henry Kissinger to know that this is dangerous, not only for the political standing of the president who is staking the election on his party’s leadership in the war on terror but even more importantly for the security of Western Civilization.


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