The consequences of Kissinger’s wars

The life story of Henry Kissinger, a major news story in the days since his death, details and illuminates the concerns of the many U.S. citizens who are dismayed by our nations outsized war machine.

Peace activists, including the City of New Haven Peace Commission, have pointed to the horridly lopsided configuration of our national budget. Of our nation’s $1.8 trillion discretionary budget, 50 percent of the money goes to the military. As for housing, schools, healthcare, job training, new roads…. all portions of the other 50 percent.

This is, in itself, a horrific set of statistics. But then, when we look at Henry Kissinger’s legacy — the huge negative piece of it — we start to get a handle on what this means in detail. Although a peace activist all of my life (I was born the week before we dropped an atomic bomb on Japan) I have looked at the budget numbers cited above and assumed that they represent the building of military bases, military staffing in all of its forms, and yes of course supplying weapons to countries across the globe —President/Gen. Eisenhower’s Military-Industrial Complex. But then we start to plug in what we are learning from Kissinger’s legacy. Yes, there are some positives in what Kissinger accomplished — opening relations with China and detente with the Soviet Union. No small accomplishments. But along the way he promoted the carpet bombing of Cambodia, the support of Pakistan’s crackdown on Bengal, the military coup in Chile, Indonesia’s invasion of East Timor, Argentina’s war against dissenters and leftists, and civil war in Angola.

I don’t point to these events as simply political/military events that ought to be questioned — they certainly should be questioned. BUT: these military aggressions cost the lives of more than a million people. And this figure is not a throwaway — it has been substantiated several times. Further, Kissinger’s perspective of maintaining our nation’s leadership position on the world stage by whatever means necessary, by whatever aggressions necessary to support military interventions — and its consequential death tolls (so long as these aggressions are outside our borders) remains a guiding principle of U.S. international policy. And therefore the bottom line of our nation’s military budget can, tragically, be seen in this way. Our nation’s policy of using military force to preserve our nation’s global dominance comes at the expense of:

• National budget money which would otherwise be available to promote human services and infrastructure at home

• Tens of thousands of human lives each year.

This is the sad and terrifying reality that a deep look into Henry Kissinger’s legacy brings to us.

There is a better way.