Sri Lanka to receive about $600m ADB funding post-IMF approval - official
(Reuters) By Uditha Jayasinghe December 5, 2023
Sri Lanka will get about $600 million, on a staggered basis, from the Asian Development Bank after the International Monetary Fund releases the second tranche of a $2.9 billion bailout for the crisis-hit country, an official said on Tuesday.
Sri Lanka is inching out of its worst financial crisis in decades, triggered by record-low foreign exchange reserves last year that saw its economy contract 7.8% in 2022.
The island's economy has been gradually stabilising after locking down a four-year programme with the IMF in March. Its first review is expected to be approved by the global lender next week, which will release a second tranche of about $334 million in funding.
Alongside the IMF programme the Asian Development Bank is likely to provide total budget support of $2 billion over the next four years, said ADB, Sri Lanka Resident Mission, Country Director Takafumi Kadono.
"I would say $500 million to $600 million budget support is what is planned (for 2024) but, again, it is subject to attainment, satisfying the policy actions, so its not free money," Kadono said in an interview with Reuters.
The bulk of the support will likely be extended next year in a combination of policy-based loans and project lending.
The first instalment of $200 million is tabled for ADB board support on Dec. 8 but will only be given to Sri Lanka after the IMF approves its first review on Dec. 12.
Another $200 million for power sector reforms is expected in 2024, along with $100 million to the water sector and $50-$70 million for the tourism sector.
An additional $100 million is earmarked in ADB support to improve access to financing for small and medium-sized enterprises, along with another $100 million to improve public finance and debt management.
Sri Lanka has to remain committed to pushing forward reforms pledged under the IMF programme, Kadono said, which include restructuring its loss-making state enterprises, reducing budget deficits and improving governance.
"These are not bandage measures. I think Sri Lanka has done a lot of that in the past so, I think it’s really time to fix the fundamentals of the economy and to address these latent weaknesses in the economy and the institutions," Kadono said.
Reporting by Uditha Jayasinghe; Editing by Sharon Singleton
Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.
A total of 256 Palestinians have been killed in the West Bank since October 7, including six prisoners who died in Israeli custody.
The Israeli army’s assault is pushing further into the south of Gaza, leaving Palestinians little chance of safety.
AJ On 4 Dec 2023
Israel has ordered Palestinians to evacuate several more areas as it widens its bombardment of the Gaza Strip, killing hundreds.
The Israeli military declared on Monday via the social media site X that it was defining “safe areas” for Gaza civilians to minimise harm to them. However, hundreds more Palestinians have been killed since the onslaught resumed on Friday, and it is unclear where civilians might seek safety.
Al Jazeera journalists on the ground say it is difficult to heed the orders in real time, with nowhere safe remaining in the enclave.
Israel published a map on Friday, dividing Gaza into “evacuation zones” and asking people to follow their announcements for their safety. However, the maps, which include nearly 2,500 grids, have confused many, while unreliable internet and electricity make keeping updated a challenge.
On Monday, an update with three arrows pointing south was issued. The instruction came the day after the Israeli military said it had expanded its ground operation to all of Gaza, targeting “Hamas centres in all” of the enclave.
ENB Poster 051223
No safe place
The renewed bombardment follows the end on Friday of the seven-day pause in the fighting between Israeli forces and Hamas fighters, which had allowed an exchange of about 105 Israeli and foreign hostages held by Hamas for 240 Palestinian prisoners.
More than 15,500 people have been killed, according to Gaza’s Ministry of Health, in nearly two months of warfare that broke out after a Hamas cross-border raid on southern Israel on October 7 in which 1,200 Israelis were killed and about 240 taken hostage.
Intense air raids overnight killed more than 100 Palestinians, according to the Hamas authorities. That raises the death toll in Gaza since Saturday to more than 800.
Israel has also stepped up attacks on the city of Khan Younis in the south, which was previously designated as a safe area, leading thousands of displaced Palestinians to flee to the city.
“This comes as hundreds of thousands of Palestinians have fled their homes and have been displaced,” said Al Jazeera’s Hamdah Salhut, reporting from occupied East Jerusalem.
“While the Israelis are chalking up battle plans for the southern part of the Gaza Strip, the reality is that there is no safe place in Gaza at the end of day 58 of this war.
“It is worth noting that the Israeli military has not shown huge military achievements or accomplishments, but rather what we have seen is a dire humanitarian catastrophe that has unfolded inside of the Gaza Strip.”
Israel launches southern Gaza ground offensive as death toll soars
West Bank raids
Israeli security forces also continued their raids in the occupied West Bank overnight and early on Monday morning.
They targeted the cities and towns of Ramallah, Jenin, Silwad, Jaffna, Jalazoun, Qalqilya and Hebron, arresting dozens of people, according to the Palestinian Wafa news agency.
Palestinian officials told Al Jazeera that at least two Palestinians were killed in the morning during an Israeli army raid in Qalqilya in the north.
Israeli army radio confirmed that two “gunmen” were killed and one wounded following a raid in the city.
Local sources told Al Jazeera that both bodies were taken away by the Israeli forces.
Reporting from Hebron, Hoda Abdel-Hamid said it is a common practice and that Israeli authorities are holding the bodies of 25 Palestinians killed in raids since October 7.
More than 3,500 people have been arrested, she added, and the majority are being held without charges.
A total of 256 Palestinians have been killed in the West Bank since October 7, including six prisoners who died in Israeli custody.
China and the EU are partners, not rivals and our common interests far exceed differences.
By Chen Qingqing : Dec 04, 2023
As agreed between China and the EU, the 24th China-EU Summit will be held in Beijing on December 7, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Hua Chunying announced on Monday. Some experts believe that as it is the first face-to-face China-EU summit in the post-COVID period, the two sides will have in-depth and candid discussions on major issues and increase mutual trust in addressing global challenges.
President Xi Jinping will meet with President of the European Council Charles Michel and President of the European Commission Ursula von der Leyen. Premier Li Qiang, President Charles Michel and President Ursula von der Leyen will jointly chair the summit, the spokesperson said.
Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi met with diplomats from the Delegation of the EU to China and from EU member states on Monday, emphasizing that if China and Europe choose dialogue and cooperation, camp confrontation will not form; if China and Europe choose peace and stability, a new Cold War will not be ignited; if China and Europe choose openness and win-win cooperation, there will be hope for global development and prosperity.
Wang, also a member of the Political Bureau of the Communist Party of China Central Committee, called on the two sides to adhere to mutual respect, remain calm and pragmatic and stick to strategic thinking.
China has always viewed the development of China-EU relations from a strategic height and long-term perspective, considering Europe an important pole in the process of multipolarization, supporting European integration, and supporting European strategic autonomy, Wang said.
The 23rd China-EU summit took place in April 2022 when Chinese and EU leaders met via video link, and exchanged views on bilateral cooperation and the Ukraine crisis.
This year's summit coincides with the 20th anniversary of the China-EU comprehensive strategic partnership and the 25th anniversary of the China-EU Summit mechanism, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Wang Wenbin said on Monday.
Xi mentioned many times that China and Europe are two major forces upholding world peace, two big markets promoting shared development, and two great civilizations promoting human progress. In his latest phone call with French President Emmanuel Macron, Xi said China and the EU should remain partners for mutually beneficial cooperation in a volatile and intertwined world.
China and the EU are partners, not rivals and our common interests far exceed differences. China hopes that the summit will play an important role by building on past achievements, enhance understanding and mutual trust through strategic communication, boost mutually beneficial cooperation through innovation, and discuss solutions through dialogue and consultation, the spokesperson said
President Xi Jinping
China and the EU are expected to strengthen mutually beneficial cooperation through exploration and innovation, explore ideas to solve problems through dialogue and consultation, and work together to tackle global challenges, he said.
China and the EU have resumed high-level exchanges in the post-COVID period since the end of the 2022 and maintained the momentum of engagement as leaders and officials from countries including Germany, France and Spain as well as from the European Council and the European Commission visited China over the year. Premier Li also visited Germany and France in June.
Meanwhile, China-EU high-level dialogues in the fields of environment and climate, digital, economy, trade and strategy have been held successfully, and consultations in various fields have been advanced, injecting new impetus into the development of bilateral relations.
The summit will be an opportunity to engage with China at the highest level and to pursue constructive and stable EU-China relations, the Delegation of the EU to China said in a statement on Monday.
The focus of the summit will be the state of EU-China relations and international issues, including the Russia-Ukraine war and the situation in the Middle East, and leaders will discuss ways of ensuring a more balanced and reciprocal trade relationship, as well as areas of shared interest such as climate change, food security, global health and pandemic preparedness, according to the statement.
The EU will advocate the need to support the multilateral rules-based international order and reaffirm its approach to de-risking and economic security, it noted.
Von der Leyen was quoted as saying in a Reuters' report in mid-November that a key goal of the EU summit with China was to "achieve a level playing field in trade in light of market distortions."
China has been defined as a partner, competitor and systemic rival by the EU. It has also launched a so-called anti-subsidy investigation into electric vehicles from China recently, drawing strong opposition from the Chinese side.
Those acts have indicated a paradox in its goal of maintaining cooperation in areas where the EU needs it while containing China and de-risking in other areas, some experts said, noting that those acts led EU into cognitive bias, and they interfered with the smooth progress of China-EU cooperation.
"Despite the differences, China and the EU could seek more high-level consensuses by eyeing pragmatic cooperation and addressing global issues in order to push forward China-EU relations at a steady pace," Zhao Junjie, a research fellow at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences' Institute of European Studies, told the Global Times on Monday.
For instance, the two sides can make joint efforts in promoting peace talks in both the Ukraine crisis and the Palestine-Israel conflict, and in the face of rising protectionism, they could explore more opportunities in digital and green economy, Zhao said. "In new energy cooperation, however, the EU is facing a new wave of protectionism, which may put up obstacles to China-EU cooperation."
Xi mentioned many times that China and Europe are two major forces upholding world peace, two big markets promoting shared development, and two great civilizations promoting human progress. In his latest phone call with French President Emmanuel Macron, Xi said China and the EU should remain partners for mutually beneficial cooperation in a volatile and intertwined world.
"The resilience of China-EU relations means that though it seeks to contain China in some areas, it cannot tackle global issues without working with China," Zhao said, noting that China will dispel some of EU's doubts through pragmatic and reciprocal cooperation but won't compromise on some core issues.
On 1 and 2 December, 154 Heads of States and Government, and 22 International Leaders gathered for the World Climate Action Summit (WCAS), signaling a new era of climate action on the road to 2030. In a complex world, the WCAS provided an opportunity for the international community to unite behind a shared commitment for more expansive and urgent climate action in response to the Paris Agreement’s first Global Stocktake.
Following the successful adoption of the agenda and early adoption of the loss and damage decision, as well as the immediate capitalization of the fund, world leaders were joined by civil society, business, indigenous peoples, youth, philanthropy, and international organizations in a spirit of shared determination and understanding of our need to unite, act and deliver urgently to close the gaps to 2030.
Leaders were clear in their unwavering ambition to keep the Paris goals within reach and shift to near-term solutions
Against the backdrop of the hottest year on record and real-world impacts felt from Derna to Maui, leaders emphasized the importance of our collective responsibility to course-correct, recognizing the range of development starting points and pathways. Several countries outlined new sectoral commitments to reduce emissions, including on methane, non-CO2 gasses and coal. The latest science from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Sixth Assessment Report and the report from the technical phase of the Global Stocktake (GST) set the context that the world is dramatically off track from pathways consistent with keeping 1.5°C and the Paris goals within reach.
Across the Summit, leaders acknowledged the urgency of the moment and the importance of near-term global solutions to close the gaps to 2030, taking account of different national circumstances. At this historic COP and following the early adoption of the decision on loss and damage, many countries called for an ambitious GST decision to inform actions beyond COP28, including a collective increase in ambition from the next round of Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs). Further progress was made in a series of high-level GST events attended by Heads of State and Government and ministers, as well as non-Party observers, and chaired by current and former High-Level Champions. The detailed outcomes of these events will be published on the UNFCCC’s website.
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Leaders from a broad range of countries also emphasized the need to agree an impactful Global Goal for Adaptation that puts adaptation focus and action on par with mitigation. Recognizing the profound impact of climate change, 18 countries took a further step to demonstrate the spirit of international solidarity and made commitments totaling $725M to date towards the fund and funding arrangements related to loss and damage, including $100M from the UAE. They celebrated the early adoption of the loss and damage decision, welcoming the unique innovation of agreeing a substantive, landmark outcome on Day One of COP28.
Leaders reiterated their commitment to transitioning to an energy system that keeps 1.5 degrees within reach
During a high-level roundtable on the energy transition, 22 Heads of State and ministers, as well as business leaders met to discuss topics including the opportunities to triple renewables and double energy efficiency, reflecting on the significant fall in the cost of clean technologies.
The leaders also highlighted the opportunities to cut emissions in every sector and to accelerate the technology innovation to address scope 3 emissions, as well as the phase down of fossil fuels in support of a transition consistent with limiting warming to 1.5°C. Leaders particularly stressed the importance of the urgency of action, whilst recognizing the need to accelerate the mobilization of finance. They highlighted the critical need in developing countries where finance and technology are prerequisites for a just energy transition that responds to increased energy demand.
Under the banner of the Global Decarbonization Accelerator (GDA), a comprehensive COP28 energy package was launched with leaders across sectors making strong commitments to accelerate a just, equitable and orderly energy transition and to slash emissions. A spotlight was put on global and cross-sector commitments to scale renewables and energy efficiency with 119 countries endorsing the Global Renewables and Energy Efficiency Pledge, with endorsement still being received. A new initiative, the Industrial Transition Accelerator (ITA), was launched to accelerate decarbonization in heavy emitting sectors and transport globally with 35 companies joining. The Oil and Gas Decarbonization Charter (OGDC) saw 51 companies, including 29 national oil companies, support its target to reach net zero emissions by 2050 or before, with 30 committing to near zero methane emissions for the first time. The Emirates Breakthrough priority actions were also launched, to motivate further government action in hard to abate sectors, supporting a pathway towards regulation.
The US-China-UAE Methane and Non-CO2 Gases Summit highlighted comprehensive action to unlock substantial near-term temperature impact with over $1.2BN announced to support methane and other non-CO2 greenhouse gases reduction across sectors in developing countries. Participants reiterated the call for whole of economy NDCs encompassing methane and other non-CO2 greenhouse gas emissions (all GHG emissions).
Throughout WCAS, leaders put a spotlight on the need to make climate finance more available, accessible and affordable
Leaders emphasized that it would be impossible to meet the goals of the Paris Agreement if sufficient finance could not be delivered, and called for a GST decision that enables the scaling up of finance and investment for climate action.
Recognizing the urgency to move from billions to trillions to address the climate finance gap, particularly in the Global South, leaders emphasized the need to transform the climate finance architecture to accelerate the transition in an equitable and inclusive way that leaves no one behind. In response, the COP28 UAE Declaration of Leaders on a Global Climate Finance Framework, co-developed and endorsed by 12 leading, representative countries laid out the contours of a new financial architecture through 10 principles to make financing available, accessible, and affordable. The report of the Independent High Level Expert Group on Climate Finance (IHLEG) that underpinned the preparation of the Declaration was released at the beginning of COP28.
The WCAS marked remarkable progress in delivering in core areas of the Declaration to enhance the flows of public, private and blended capital. In addition to the positive signal from Canada and Germany that the$100BN will have been met this year, almost $3.16BN was pledged to the Green Climate Fund, bringing the second replenishment to a historic total of $12.48BN, in addition to the $725M pledged to the fund and funding arrangements related to loss and damage, and the contributions made to the Adaptation Fund.
The World Bank announced an increased climate finance target of 45 percent, committing to deploy over $40BN per year by 2025, of which $9BN is additional, equally between mitigation and adaptation, and the UAE committed $200M Special Drawing Rights to the Resilience and Sustainability Trust of the IMF. Many countries also highlighted that more needs to be done to close the growing adaptation finance gap and to address the global debt crisis that is holding many countries back from taking truly transformative steps in their national transitions. A new Green Industrialization Initiative was announced with 12 African Heads of State to rapidly scale up clean energy in Africa, building on the UAE‘s Green Investment Initiative from the Africa Climate Summit in September.
Special emphasis was further given by many leaders to the need to unlock the potential of the private sector. Several government and financial leaders put forward a series of bold steps, policy incentives and innovative instruments to enable climate financing, including in the Global South, including the UAE’s launch of the $30BN catalytic climate fund ALTERRA.
World is dramatically off track from pathways consistent with keeping 1.5°C and the Paris goals.
The latest science from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Sixth Assessment Report and the report from the technical phase of the Global Stocktake (GST) set the context that the world is dramatically off track from pathways consistent with keeping 1.5°C and the Paris goals within reach.
Leaders emphasized the need to put nature, lives and livelihoods at the heart of climate action
The Summit also gave a clear signal to prioritize protecting nature, lives and livelihoods and ensuring sustainable development for all. 137 Heads of State and government unprecedently committed to new ambition on food systems transformation within their national climate plans under the COP28 UAE Declaration on Sustainable Agriculture, Resilient Food Systems, and Climate Action, alongside pioneering regenerative agriculture and climate-food innovation financing commitments totaling $2.6BN. In a watershed moment for climate and health, 125 countries endorsed the COP28 UAE Declaration on Climate and Health, and finance providers mobilized an initial tranche of $1BN for climate and health solutions.
Nature also saw sharply increased political will for climate action, with forest-rich countries across Asia, Africa, and South America, and ocean-rich countries in the Pacific introducing landmark investment plans to simultaneously implement the Paris Agreement and new Global Biodiversity Framework, another recurring theme of WCAS, particularly on the road to COP30. These countries also announced $2.59BN of underpinning finance from public and private sources and emphasized the livelihoods and development goals of local and indigenous communities. Water featured on the agenda for only the second time in a COP, with a focus on water scarcity and access, toward which the UAE made a contribution of $150M. Multilateral Development Banks committed to doubling their climate portfolio for water within three years. Over 150 businesses and investors adopted the actions laid out in the Nature Positive for Climate Action call to action.
Inclusion and mobilization were central themes at WCAS with leaders highlighting the need to come together in unity
The WCAS made a clear and powerful call for inclusive climate action and solidarity, highlighting the key roles of civil society, women, youth, local leaders, faith-based communities, Indigenous Peoples and those on the frontline of climate change. Children and youth delivered a strong set of policy demands through the Global Youth Statement, which received input from over 750,000 youth, and was handed over for the first time in a COP to HE Shamma as the Youth Climate Champion. Leaders emphasized the need to transform education systems, and a $70M investment was announced to build climate resilient schools in vulnerable countries. More than 500 mayors, governors and other local leaders participated in WCAS, including through the dedicated Local Climate Action Summit, where the COP28 Presidency announced the groundbreaking Coalition of High Ambition Multilevel Partners (CHAMP) Pledge - endorsed by 64 countries committing to partner with subnational governments on the next round of NDCs and other climate plans and strategies. In total, nearly $470M was mobilized toward urban climate action.
Over 850 businesses and philanthropic participated in the Business and Philanthropy Forum and announced $5BN in new funding to turbocharge the climate transition in emerging economies. Over 200 Small and Medium sized Enterprises, mainly from the Global South, joined to play their part in driving a step-change in the development and deployment of climate tech solutions.
Outcomes across the WCAS built on and enhanced the work under the Marrakech Partnership for Global Climate Action, led by the UNFCCC High-Level Climate Champions, as demonstrated at the launch of their implementation roadmap of 2030 Climate Solutions.
The COP28 Presidency looks forward to working with a spirit of transparency and inclusivity with all Parties and Observers to build on the momentum and direction set out by leaders to deliver a successful outcome in Dubai as evidence of the multilateral unity that is required to keep 1.5°C within reach.
Israel Knew Hamas’s Attack Plan More Than a Year Ago
A blueprint reviewed by The Times laid out the attack in detail. Israeli officials dismissed it as aspirational and ignored specific warnings.
Israeli officials obtained Hamas’s battle plan for the Oct. 7 terrorist attack more than a year before it happened, documents, emails and interviews show. But Israeli military and intelligence officials dismissed the plan as aspirational, considering it too difficult for Hamas to carry out.
The approximately 40-page document, which the Israeli authorities code-named “Jericho Wall,” outlined, point by point, exactly the kind of devastating invasion that led to the deaths of about 1,200 people.
Ronen Bergman is a staff writer for The New York Times Magazine, based in Tel Aviv. His latest book is “Rise and Kill First: The Secret History of Israel’s Targeted Assassinations,” published by Random House. More about Ronen Bergman Adam Goldman writes about the F.B.I. and national security. He has been a journalist for more than two decades.
The translated document, which was reviewed by The New York Times, did not set a date for the attack, but described a methodical assault designed to overwhelm the fortifications around the Gaza Strip, take over Israeli cities and storm key military bases, including a division headquarters.
Hamas followed the blueprint with shocking precision. The document called for a barrage of rockets at the outset of the attack, drones to knock out the security cameras and automated machine guns along the border, and gunmen to pour into Israel en masse in paragliders, on motorcycles and on foot — all of which happened on Oct. 7.
The plan also included details about the location and size of Israeli military forces, communication hubs and other sensitive information, raising questions about how Hamas gathered its intelligence and whether there were leaks inside the Israeli security establishment.
The document circulated widely among Israeli military and intelligence leaders, but experts determined that an attack of that scale and ambition was beyond Hamas’s capabilities, according to documents and officials. It is unclear whether Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu or other top political leaders saw the document, as well.
Last year, shortly after the document was obtained, officials in the Israeli military’s Gaza division, which is responsible for defending the border with Gaza, said that Hamas’s intentions were unclear.
“It is not yet possible to determine whether the plan has been fully accepted and how it will be manifested,” read a military assessment reviewed by The Times.
Then, in July, just three months before the attacks, a veteran analyst with Unit 8200, Israel’s signals intelligence agency, warned that Hamas had conducted an intense, daylong training exercise that appeared similar to what was outlined in the blueprint.
But a colonel in the Gaza division brushed off her concerns, according to encrypted emails viewed by The Times.
“I utterly refute that the scenario is imaginary,” the analyst wrote in the email exchanges. The Hamas training exercise, she said, fully matched “the content of Jericho Wall.”
“It is a plan designed to start a war,” she added. “It’s not just a raid on a village.”
Officials privately concede that, had the military taken these warnings seriously and redirected significant reinforcements to the south, where Hamas attacked, Israel could have blunted the attacks or possibly even prevented them.
Instead, the Israeli military was unprepared as terrorists streamed out of the Gaza Strip. It was the deadliest day in Israel’s history.
Israeli security officials have already acknowledged that they failed to protect the country, and the government is expected to assemble a commission to study the events leading up to the attacks. The Jericho Wall document lays bare a yearslong cascade of missteps that culminated in what officials now regard as the worst Israeli intelligence failure since the surprise attack that led to the Arab-Israeli war of 1973.
Underpinning all these failures was a single, fatally inaccurate belief that Hamas lacked the capability to attack and would not dare to do so. That belief was so ingrained in the Israeli government, officials said, that they disregarded growing evidence to the contrary.
The Israeli military and the Israeli Security Agency, which is in charge of counterterrorism in Gaza, declined to comment.
A blueprint reviewed by The Times laid out the attack in detail.
Officials would not say how they obtained the Jericho Wall document, but it was among several versions of attack plans collected over the years. A 2016 Defense Ministry memorandum viewed by The Times, for example, says, “Hamas intends to move the next confrontation into Israeli territory.”
Such an attack would most likely involve hostage-taking and “occupying an Israeli community (and perhaps even a number of communities),” the memo reads.
The Jericho Wall document, named for the ancient fortifications in the modern-day West Bank, was even more explicit. It detailed rocket attacks to distract Israeli soldiers and send them hurrying into bunkers, and drones to disable the elaborate security measures along the border fence separating Israel and Gaza.
Hamas fighters would then break through 60 points in the wall, storming across the border into Israel. The document begins with a quote from the Quran: “Surprise them through the gate. If you do, you will certainly prevail.”
The same phrase has been widely used by Hamas in its videos and statements since Oct. 7.
One of the most important objectives outlined in the document was to overrun the Israeli military base in Re’im, which is home to the Gaza division responsible for protecting the region. Other bases that fell under the division’s command were also listed.
Hamas carried out that objective on Oct. 7, rampaging through Re’im and overrunning parts of the base.
The audacity of the blueprint, officials said, made it easy to underestimate. All militaries write plans that they never use, and Israeli officials assessed that, even if Hamas invaded, it might muster a force of a few dozen, not the hundreds who ultimately attacked.
Israel had also misread Hamas’s actions. The group had negotiated for permits to allow Palestinians to work in Israel, which Israeli officials took as a sign that Hamas was not looking for a war.
But Hamas had been drafting attack plans for many years, and Israeli officials had gotten hold of previous iterations of them. What could have been an intelligence coup turned into one of the worst miscalculations in Israel’s 75-year history.
In September 2016, the defense minister’s office compiled a top-secret memorandum based on a much earlier iteration of a Hamas attack plan. The memorandum, which was signed by the defense minister at the time, Avigdor Lieberman, said that an invasion and hostage-taking would “lead to severe damage to the consciousness and morale of the citizens of Israel.”
The memo, which was viewed by The Times, said that Hamas had purchased sophisticated weapons, GPS jammers and drones. It also said that Hamas had increased its fighting force to 27,000 people — having added 6,000 to its ranks in a two-year period. Hamas had hoped to reach 40,000 by 2020, the memo determined.
Last year, after Israel obtained the Jericho Wall document, the military’s Gaza division drafted its own intelligence assessment of this latest invasion plan.
Hamas had “decided to plan a new raid, unprecedented in its scope,” analysts wrote in the assessment reviewed by The Times. It said that Hamas intended to carry out a deception operation followed by a “large-scale maneuver” with the aim of overwhelming the division.
But the Gaza division referred to the plan as a “compass.” In other words, the division determined that Hamas knew where it wanted to go but had not arrived there yet.
On July 6, 2023, the veteran Unit 8200 analyst wrote to a group of other intelligence experts that dozens of Hamas commandos had recently conducted training exercises, with senior Hamas commanders observing.
The training included a dry run of shooting down Israeli aircraft and taking over a kibbutz and a military training base, killing all the cadets. During the exercise, Hamas fighters used the same phrase from the Quran that appeared at the top of the Jericho Wall attack plan, she wrote in the email exchanges viewed by The Times.
The analyst warned that the drill closely followed the Jericho Wall plan, and that Hamas was building the capacity to carry it out.
The colonel in the Gaza division applauded the analysis but said the exercise was part of a “totally imaginative” scenario, not an indication of Hamas’s ability to pull it off.
“In short, let’s wait patiently,” the colonel wrote.
The back-and-forth continued, with some colleagues supporting the analyst’s original conclusion. Soon, she invoked the lessons of the 1973 war, in which Syrian and Egyptian armies overran Israeli defenses. Israeli forces regrouped and repelled the invasion, but the intelligence failure has long served as a lesson for Israeli security officials.
“We already underwent a similar experience 50 years ago on the southern front in connection with a scenario that seemed imaginary, and history may repeat itself if we are not careful,” the analyst wrote to her colleagues.
While ominous, none of the emails predicted that war was imminent. Nor did the analyst challenge the conventional wisdom among Israeli intelligence officials that Yahya Sinwar, the leader of Hamas, was not interested in war with Israel. But she correctly assessed that Hamas’s capabilities had drastically improved. The gap between the possible and the aspirational had narrowed significantly.
The failures to connect the dots echoed another analytical failure more than two decades ago, when the American authorities also had multiple indications that the terrorist group Al Qaeda was preparing an assault. The Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were largely a failure of analysis and imagination, a government commission concluded.
“The Israeli intelligence failure on Oct. 7 is sounding more and more like our 9/11,” said Ted Singer, a recently retired senior C.I.A. official who worked extensively in the Middle East. “The failure will be a gap in analysis to paint a convincing picture to military and political leadership that Hamas had the intention to launch the attack when it did.”
Abombshell new investigation from The Intercept reveals that former U.S. national security adviser and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger was responsible for even more civilian deaths during the U.S. war in Cambodia than was previously known. The revelations add to a violent résumé that ranges from Latin America to Southeast Asia, where Kissinger presided over brutal U.S. military interventions to put down communist revolt and to develop U.S. influence around the world. While survivors and family members of these deadly campaigns continue to grieve, Kissinger celebrates his 100th birthday this week. “This adds to the list of killings and crimes that Henry Kissinger should, even at this very late date in his life, be asked to answer for,” says The Intercept’s Nick Turse, author of the new investigation, “Kissinger’s Killing Fields.” We also speak with Yale University’s Greg Grandin, author of Kissinger’s Shadow: The Long Reach of America’s Most Controversial Statesman.
Henry Kissinger died on Wednesday at his home in Connecticut, his consulting firm said in a statement.
The notorious war criminal was 100.
Measuring purely by confirmed kills, the worst mass murderer ever executed by the United States was the white-supremacist terrorist Timothy McVeigh. On April 19, 1995, McVeigh detonated a massive bomb at the Murrah federal building in Oklahoma City, killing 168 people, including 19 children. The government killed McVeigh by lethal injection in June 2001. Whatever hesitation a state execution provokes, even over a man such as McVeigh — necessary questions about the legitimacy of killing even an unrepentant soldier of white supremacy — his death provided a measure of closure to the mother of one of his victims. “It’s a period at the end of a sentence,” said Kathleen Treanor, whose four-year-old McVeigh killed.
McVeigh, who in his own psychotic way thought he was saving America, never remotely killed on the scale of Kissinger, the most revered American grand strategist of the second half of the 20th century.
The Yale University historian Greg Grandin, author of the biography Kissinger’s Shadow, estimates that Kissinger’s actions from 1969 through 1976, a period of eight brief years when Kissinger made Richard Nixon’s and then Gerald Ford’s foreign policy as national security adviser and secretary of state, meant the end of between three and four million people. That includes “crimes of commission,” he explained, as in Cambodia and Chile, and omission, like greenlighting Indonesia’s bloodshed in East Timor; Pakistan’s bloodshed in Bangladesh; and the inauguration of an American tradition of using and then abandoning the Kurds.
“The Cubans say there is no evil that lasts a hundred years, and Kissinger is making a run to prove them wrong,” Grandin told Rolling Stone not long before Kissinger died. “There is no doubt he’ll be hailed as a geopolitical grand strategist, even though he bungled most crises, leading to escalation. He’ll get credit for opening China, but that was De Gaulle’s original idea and initiative. He’ll be praised for detente, and that was a success, but he undermined his own legacy by aligning with the neocons. And of course, he’ll get off scot free from Watergate, even though his obsession with Daniel Ellsberg really drove the crime.
No infamy will find Kissinger on a day like today. Instead, in a demonstration of why he was able to kill so many people and get away with it, the day of his passage will be a solemn one in Congress and — shamefully, since Kissinger had reporters like CBS’ Marvin Kalb and The New York Times‘ Hendrick Smith wiretapped — newsrooms. Kissinger, a refugee from the Nazis who became a pedigreed member of the “Eastern Establishment” Nixon hated, was a practitioner of American greatness, and so the press lionized him as the cold-blooded genius who restored America’s prestige from the agony of Vietnam.
Not once in the half-century that followed Kissinger’s departure from power did the millions the United States killed matter for his reputation, except to confirm a ruthlessness that pundits occasionally find thrilling. America, like every empire, champions its state murderers. The only time I was ever in the same room as Henry Kissinger was at a 2015 national security conference at West Point. He was surrounded by fawning Army officers and ex-officials basking in the presence of a statesman.
Seymour Hersh, the investigative reporter who was the most prominent exception to the fawning coverage of Kissinger, watched journalistic deference take shape as soon as Kissinger entered the White House in 1969. “His social comings and goings could make or break a Washington party,” Hersh wrote in his biography The Price of Power. Reporters like the Times’ James Reston were eager participants in what Hersh called “an implicit shakedown scheme” — that is, access journalism — “in which reporters who got inside information in turn protected Kissinger by not divulging either the full consequences of his acts or his own connection to them.” Kissinger’s approach to the press was his approach to Nixon: sniveling obsequiousness. (Although Kissinger could vent frustration on reporters that he never could on his boss.) Hersh quotes H.R. Haldeman, Nixon’s chief of staff, remarking that Kissinger was the “hawk of hawks” inside the White House, but “touching glasses at a party with his liberal friends, the belligerent Kissinger would suddenly become a dove.”
Reviewing one of Kissinger’s litany of books, Hillary Clinton in 2014 said Kissinger, “a friend” whose counsel she relied upon as secretary of state, possessed “a conviction that we, and President Obama, share: a belief in the indispensability of continued American leadership in service of a just and liberal order.” Kissinger told USA Today within days that Clinton, presumed then to be a president-in-waiting, “ran the State Department in the most effective way that I’ve ever seen.” The same story noticed a photograph autographed by Obama thanking Kissinger for his “continued leadership.”
It’s always valuable to hear the reverent tones with which American elites speak of their monsters. When the Kissingers of the world pass, their humanity, their purpose, their sacrifices are foremost in the minds of the respectable. American elites recoiled in disgust when Iranians in great numbers took to the streets to honor one of their monsters, Qassem Soleimani, after a U.S. drone strike executed the Iranian external security chief in January 2020. Soleimani, whom the United States declared to be a terrorist and killed as such, killed far more people than Timothy McVeigh. But even if we attribute to him all the deaths in the Syrian Civil War, never in Soleimani’s wildest dreams could he kill as many people as Henry Kissinger. Nor did Soleimani get to date Jill St. John, who played Bond girl Tiffany Case in Diamonds Are Forever.
KISSINGER’S ASCENT OCCURRED THROUGH AN OBSCENITY THAT TIME CANNOT DIMINISH.
In 1968, Lyndon Johnson agreed to peace negotiations with the North Vietnamese in tacit recognition of the nightmare he, building on the works of his two immediate predecessors, brought to life in Vietnam. Kissinger, an influential Cold War defense intellectual at Harvard, had access to members of the diplomatic delegation to the Paris talks. He used it to feed information from the negotiations to Richard Nixon’s presidential campaign — a campaign whose defeated GOP rival, Nelson Rockefeller, Kissinger advised — and despite Kissinger’s closer political ties to the coterie around Hubert Humphrey, Nixon’s Democratic rival.
Nixon ran for president claiming to have a secret plan to end the war. His advisers told Hersh they were deeply afraid that Johnson and Hanoi would reach an accord before the election. It would save lives in Vietnam, American and Vietnamese, but it would undermine Nixon’s hopes of exploiting the explosion in domestic antiwar sentiment. Nixon gratefully took what Kissinger gave him to make the U.S.’ proxy regime in Saigon, whose regime peace would destabilize, more intransigent. No agreement was reached until 1973, and the war ended in American humiliation with Hanoi’s 1975 victory.
“It took some balls to give us those tips,” Richard Allen, a foreign policy researcher on the Nixon campaign, later reflected to Hersh. After all, it was “a pretty dangerous thing for [Kissinger] to be screwing around with the national security.”
Every single person who died in Vietnam between autumn 1968 and the Fall of Saigon — and all who died in Laos and Cambodia, where Nixon and Kissinger secretly expanded the war within months of taking office, as well as all who died in the aftermath, like the Cambodian genocide their destabilization set into motion — died because of Henry Kissinger. We will never know what might have been, the question Kissinger’s apologists, and those in the U.S. foreign policy elite who imagine themselves standing in Kissinger’s shoes, insist upon when explaining away his crimes. We can only know what actually happened. What actually happened was that Kissinger materially sabotaged the only chance for an end to the war in 1968 as a hedged bet to ensure he would achieve power in Nixon’s administration or Humphrey’s. A true tally will probably never be known of everyone who died so Kissinger could be national security adviser.
Once in the White House, Nixon and Kissinger found themselves without leverage to produce a peace accord with Hanoi. In the hopes of manufacturing one, they came up with the “Madman Theory,” the idea that North Vietnam would negotiate peace after they came to believe Nixon was adventurous and bloodthirsty enough to risk anything. In February 1969, weeks after taking office, and lasting through April 1970, U.S. warplanes secretly dropped 110,000 tons of bombs on Cambodia. By the summer of 1969, according to a colonel on the Joint Staff, Kissinger — who had no constitutional role in the military chain of command — was personally selecting bombing targets. “Not only was Henry carefully screening the raids, he was reading the raw intelligence,” Col. Ray B. Sitton told Hersh for The Price of Power. A second phase of bombing continued until August 1973, five months after the final U.S. combat troops withdrew from Vietnam. By then, U.S. bombs had killed an estimated 100,000 people out of a population of only 7,000,000. The final phase of the bombing, which occurred after the Paris Peace Accords mandated U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam, was its most intense, an act of cruel vengeance from a thwarted superpower.
Cambodia, like Laos before it, was a formally neutral country, meaning that bombing it was an illegal aggression under the United Nations Charter. But beyond the control of Prince Sihanouk, the North Vietnamese used Cambodian territory for the Ho Chi Minh Trail, a weapons pipeline not unlike the one America is currently operating for Ukraine. In April 1970, following a coup by American client Col. Lon Nol that overthrew Sihanouk, Nixon ordered U.S. troops in Vietnam to invade Cambodia outright. In the air or on the ground, they were unable to destroy the trail, only human beings. Those who survived reacted. “Sometimes the bombs fell and hit the little children, and their fathers would be all for the Khmer Rouge,” a former Khmer Rouge cadre told historian Ben Kiernan, founder of Yale University’s Genocide Studies Program.
Nixon and Kissinger’s failure in Cambodia prompted in 1971 the U.S.-South Vietnamese invasion of Laos, another failure. Kissinger later blamed defeat on the U.S.’ clients, rather than, say, people like himself. “In retrospect, I have come to doubt whether the South Vietnamese ever really understood what we were trying to accomplish,” Kissinger wrote in his memoirs.
At the time, the secret bombing of Cambodia was a startling offense that prompted substantial political backlash when it became public. One of the articles of impeachment against Nixon prepared by the House Judiciary Committee in 1974 held that bombing Cambodia was a constitutional usurpation of Congress’ war powers. But on July 30, the committee ended up rejecting the article, 26 votes to 12, and it never became part of the coalescing impeachment effort that stopped with Nixon’s resignation.
Forty years later, and likely as a consequence, U.S. presidents routinely bomb countries the U.S. is not at war with. They provide the barest minimum of disclosure that the bombs have fallen, and often not even that. When the U.S.’ declared wars fail, as they did in Iraq and Afghanistan, their architects and stewards blame the client militaries and governments they propped up. They cover their troop withdrawals with futile bombing campaigns that kill people so American statesmen can save face. Whether he realized it or not, when President Biden in July 2021 blamed the Afghans for losing the Afghanistan war — “the Afghan military collapsed, sometimes without trying to fight” was a typical line — he was reaching for Nixon and Kissinger’s template.
KISSINGER PLAYED A ROLE IN THE DEATHS OF SO MANY DIFFERENT PEOPLES that treating each with due consideration requires writing a book. Here is one example among many of the sort of carnage Kissinger inflicted indirectly rather than by edict. In 1971, the Pakistani government waged a campaign of genocide to suppress the independence movement in what would become Bangladesh. Pakistan’s Yahya Khan, an architect of the genocide, was valuable to Nixon’s ambitions of restoring diplomatic relations with China. So the U.S. let Khan’s forces rape and murder at least 300,000 people — and perhaps three million. “We can’t allow a friend of ours and China’s to get screwed in a conflict with a friend of India’s,” Nixon quoted Kissinger shrugging.
That perspective typified Kissinger. The Cold War was a geopolitical balance among two great powers. The purpose of Cold War statecraft was to maximize American freedom of action to inflict Washington’s will on the world — a zero-sum contest that meant restricting the ability of the Soviet Union to inflict Moscow’s — without the destabilization, or outright armageddon, that would result from pursuing a final defeat of the Soviets. That last part explains much right-wing hostility toward Kissinger. Kissinger represented anticommunism without ideological zeal. He was an energetic, even relentless practitioner of the Cold War, the theater of anticommunist conflict. But like George Kennan before him, Kissinger thought viewing the Cold War in ideological terms missed the point. The point was American geopolitical dominance, something measured in impunity and achieved by any means necessary. That permitted Nixon and Kissinger the creativity to reopen China, something Nixon would have demagogued anyone else for attempting.
The 1972 visit by United States President Richard Nixon to the People's Republic of China was an important strategic and diplomatic overture that marked the culmination of the Nixon administration's resumption of harmonious relations between the United States of America and the People's Republic of China after years of diplomatic isolation.
Reopening China was by far the greatest achievement of Nixon’s foreign policy. It was the rare geopolitical initiative where Kissinger was a mere facilitator. Sy Hersh, in The Price of Power, calls Nixon “the grand theoretician” of rapprochement with Beijing, with Kissinger Nixon’s “occasional operative.” Kissinger’s dramatic, secret July 1971 trip to Beijing in advance of Nixon’s visit probably renders that description parsimonious. But, writes Hersh, “there is no evidence that Kissinger seriously considered the question of an American-Chinese rapprochement before his appointment as Nixon’s national security adviser.” Once it happened, Kissinger became an overnight celebrity, the sort of person destined to be shrouded in myth and apology.
Kissinger might not have been motivated by hatred of communism. But he was a reactionary who empowered and enabled the sort of reactionaries for whom anticommunism was a respectable channel for America’s racist and exploitative socio-economic traditions. His chief aide on the National Security Council was a rabid anti communist militarist, Army Col. Alexander Haig, a future secretary of state for Ronald Reagan. When Kissinger came under attack from neoconservatives and others on the right who couldn’t tolerate detente with the Soviets and rapprochement with the Chinese, neither he nor they recognized that both of them were driven by the Cold War forces that Kissinger stoked when convenient.
Most important of all the reactionaries was Nixon, without whom Kissinger would have lacked power, and from whom Kissinger would withstand any indignity.
Nixon was one of the original Cold War demagogues, the men who never hesitated to identify communism with Black people and the “Eastern Establishment” liberals who postured as allies. His escalation in Vietnam, along with the secret bombing in Cambodia he revealed in a televised address, prompted a resurgence of the antiwar movement. Nixon exploited the mass protests by contrasting them with the “silent majority” of loyal Americans. Instead of ending the war, as he had campaigned on doing, and silencing or co-opting the antiwar movement in the process, Nixon inflamed a culture war to distract from it. It was an echo of his infamous “Southern Strategy” to harness for the Republican Party the electoral benefits of white backlash to the civil rights movement.
The 1972 visit by United States President Richard Nixon to the People's Republic of China
Nixon was not subtle about who he meant by the Eastern Establishment. When the media seized upon the U.S. massacre at My Lai, Nixon remarked, “It’s those dirty rotten Jews from New York who are behind it.” Nixon’s White House counsel, John Erlichman, recalled Nixon talking about “Jewish traitors” in front of Kissinger, including “Jews at Harvard.” Kissinger would assure the boss he was one of the good ones. “Well, Mr. President,” Erlichman quoted him responding, “there are Jews and Jews.”
Kissinger maintained his standing in part by savaging the Eastern Establishment from which he emerged. It was not entirely cynical. Kissinger shared with Nixon a contempt for the “defeatism” and “pessimism” of those who flinched at the unsavory Vietnam War they once supported. He rationalized his purges of the National Security Council bureaucracy and his marginalization of the State Department — measures that made him indispensable to foreign policy, and to Nixon — as protecting American power from those who lacked the confidence to wield it. It is revealing that among those who make U.S. foreign policy, Kissinger’s perspective is not considered ideological.
Kissinger’s consolidation of bureaucratic control was punitive and paranoid. He used the fear of internal leaks to get the FBI to wiretap his staff and the journalists he suspected of receiving their information. Yet the Eastern Establishmentarians around Kissinger, on his staff or in the press, followed him like a puppy seeking an ear scratch. His coldblooded American exceptionalism was the perfect tone for speaking to a shaken ruling class. Anthony Lake, who would go on to become national security adviser to Bill Clinton, finally quit in May 1970, alongside his colleague Roger Morris. Their breaking points were the Vietnam escalation, Nixon’s alcoholism, and the surreptitious White House wiretaps that Nixon also pursued to enforce loyalty. But Lake and Morris opted not to go public. “I consider the failure to do so to be the biggest failure of my life,” Morris told Hersh for The Price of Power. “We didn’t do so on the single calculation that it would destroy Henry.” Weeks later, Kissinger, via Haig, had the FBI wiretap Lake.
IN SOUTHEAST ASIA, KISSINGER DESTROYED.
But in Chile, he helped build a template for the world in which we currently live.
On September 4, 1970, Chileans elected the democratic socialist Salvador Allende president. Allende’s program was more than redistributionist. It demanded reparation from the U.S. for exploiting it. Chile is rich in copper, and by the mid-1960s, 80 percent of its copper production was controlled by American corporations, particularly the firms Anaconda Copper and Kennecott. When Allende nationalized mining assets held by the two companies, Allende informed them he would deduct estimated “excess profit” from a compensatory package he was willing to pay the firms. It was this sort of unacceptable policy that prompted Kissinger to remark, during an intelligence meeting about two months before Allende’s election, “I don’t see why we need to stand idly by and watch a country go communist due to the irresponsibility of its own people.”
Kissinger meant that there must never be an example of a country in America’s sphere of influence delivering socialism through the ballot. “Henry saw Allende as being a far more serious threat than Castro,” Kissinger staffer Morris told Hersh. “Allende was a living example of democratic social reform in Latin America.”
Kissinger and the CIA had decided to overthrow Allende just days after Allende’s election. Upon learning what was in motion, the U.S. ambassador in Santiago, Edward Korry, who was second to none in opposing Allende, cabled Kissinger that “to actively encourage a coup could lead us to a Bay of Pigs failure.” An “apoplectic Kissinger” told Korry to stay out of the way, according to Tim Weiner’s Legacy of Ashes: The History of The CIA. When the CIA failed at what Korry termed a Rube Goldberg gambit to get the Chilean Congress to stop Allende from taking office — that’s right, the CIA tried a January 6 in Chile — Haig urged his boss to purge “the key left-wing dominated slots” in the agency.
Korry was wrong in the end. Kissinger’s policy of overthrowing Allende — “Why not support extremists?” he spitballed in a December 1970 White House meeting with the CIA’s covert-operations chief, Tom Karamessines — paid off on September 11, 1973, when a military junta took power, prompting Allende’s suicide. He would be among the first of 3,200 Chileans to die violently under the 17-year regime of Augusto Pinochet and his Caravana de la Muerte, to say nothing of the tens of thousands tortured and imprisoned. “In the Eisenhower period, we would be heroes,” Kissinger told Nixon in a telephone conversation days after the coup. The same week he denied at his Senate confirmation hearings that the U.S. played any role in it.
The coup was only the beginning. Within two years, Pinochet’s regime invited Milton Friedman, Arnold Harberger, and other economists from the University of Chicago to advise them. Chile pioneered the implementation of their agenda: severe government budgetary austerity; relentless assaults on organized labor; privatization of state assets, including health care and public pensions; layoffs of government employees; abolition of wages and price controls; and deregulation of capital markets. “Multinationals were not only granted the right to repatriate 100 percent of their profits but given guaranteed exchange rates to help them do so,” Grandin writes in his book Empire’s Workshop. European and American bankers flocked to Chile before its 1982 economic collapse. The World Bank and Inter-American Development Bank loaned Pinochet $3.1 billion between 1976 and 1986. As Corey Robin has documented, Friedrich von Hayek’s neoliberal Mont Pelerin Society held a 1981 meeting in the very city where the junta plotted the replacement of democratic socialism with a harbinger of today’s global economic order.
Pinochet’s torture chambers were the maternity ward of neoliberalism, a baby delivered bloody and screaming by Henry Kissinger. This was the “just and liberal world order” Hillary Clinton considered Kissinger’s life work.
He was no less foundational in pushing the frontiers of where American military power could operate. It turned out the secret bombing of Cambodia and Laos, which lasted years, represented a template. When Nixon in 1970 revealed the secret bombings, it was a step too far even for Thomas Schelling, one of the Pentagon’s favorite defense academics, who called them “sickening.” As Grandin writes in Kissinger’s Shadow, the Cambridge-to-Washington set was not prepared in 1970 to accept that the U.S. had the right to destroy an enemy “safe haven” in a country it was not at war with and to do it all in secret, thereby shielding a war from basic public scrutiny. After 9/11, those assertions became accepted, foundational pillars of a War on Terror permitting four presidents to bomb, for 20 years, Pakistanis, Yemenis, Somalis, Libyans, Syrians, and others.
Kissinger met with Pinochet in Santiago in June 1976. It was a time of rising U.S. congressional anger at Pinochet’s reign of terror. Kissinger informed the general that he was obliged to make an anodyne criticism of Pinochet to forestall adverse legislation. “My evaluation is that you are a victim of all left-wing groups around the world,” Kissinger said, according to a declassified cable, “and that your greatest sin was that you overthrew a government which was going Communist.” Three months later, U.S. diplomats warned Kissinger about Operation Condor, an international campaign of right-wing assassinations pursued by the anticommunist regimes of Chile, Argentina, and Uruguay. Kissinger “has instructed that no further action be taken on this matter,” according to a September 16, 1976 cable. Five days later, a car bomb emplaced by Pinochet’s agents detonated along Washington D.C.’s Embassy Row, killing Orlando Letelier, Allende’s foreign minister, and his American co-worker, Ronni Moffitt.
In 1999, Pinochet was arrested in London through an effort by Baltazar Garzon, a Spanish judge investigating Operation Condor. Kissinger urged the British not to extradite the general. “I would be very happy if Pinochet was allowed home,” he told an interviewer. “This episode has gone on long enough and all my sympathies are with him.” Two years later, the administration of George W. Bush responded contemptuously to the Chilean Supreme Court’s efforts to compel Kissinger to testify. “It is unjust and ridiculous that a distinguished servant of this country should be harassed by foreign courts in this way,” an official told the Daily Telegraph. The paper noted that Kissinger was an “informal adviser” to Bush, as he was to many presidents.
Bush’s declaration of protection for Kissinger, coupled with his rejection of the Rome Treaty on the International Criminal Court, extinguished a glimmer of hope that Kissinger would someday join Pinochet under arrest. It was always a fantasy. The international architecture that the U.S. and its allies established after World War II, shorthanded today as the “rules-based international order,” somehow never gets around to applying the same pressure on a hegemonic United States as it applies to U.S.-hostile or defiant powers. It reflects the organizing principle of American exceptionalism: America acts; it is not acted upon. Henry Kissinger was a supreme architect of the rules-based international order.
In that regard, Kissinger was singular but was by no means unique. Kissinger built upon foundations constructed by Henry Morgenthau, Dean Acheson, George Kennan, Paul Nitze, the Dulles brothers, the Bundy brothers, JFK — you could go back to Albert Thayer Mahan and Teddy Roosevelt if you wanted; or James Monroe; or, depending on how fundamental you think empire is to America, 1619. He and Nixon chose to escalate in Vietnam and pursue the destruction of Cambodia. But the Pentagon Papers showed that the Vietnam War was the result of compounding decisions made in the Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson administrations. The Vietnamese guerilla and justice minister Truong Nhu Tang writes in his Viet Cong Memoir that Kissinger, whose intellect he praises, “inherited a conceptual framework from his American and French predecessors … that led him to disaster.”
Kissinger and Nixon turned that into Watergate — as Grandin pointed out earlier in this story, Watergate began with a demand for vengeance on Daniel Ellsberg, the anti-Kissinger, for leaking the Pentagon Papers. Watergate was a grim demonstration, for neither the first nor the last time, that the crimes America commits abroad have a dialectical relationship with the crimes that America commits at home. Infamy has as many fathers as victory.
That, ultimately, is why Kissinger died a celebrity, with the wealth necessary to get taken in by Theranos. It is why Roger Morris and Anthony Lake opted against telling the country that the commander-in-chief was an alcoholic who was secretly surveilling his real and imagined critics. Whatever Kissinger’s origins, whatever rants about Jewboys he had to endure, Kissinger was an exemplar of the self-confident geopolitical potency that America’s elites, whatever they might personally think of Henry Kissinger, want America to make the world respect. When the Roger Morrises and Anthony Lakes and Hillary Clintons see Henry Kissinger, they see, despite what they will rotely and euphemistically acknowledge as his flaws, themselves as they wish to be.
Kissinger lived for over half a century in the world he had made. He was its hubris. He could see that the Iraq war would be a disaster, but he went along with it anyway, declaring: “the case for removing Iraq’s capacity of mass destruction is extremely strong.” Kissinger’s calculation, expressed in the noblest possible way, is that acceptance of an impending disaster is the price of influencing and hence mitigating it. His accommodation to the inevitability of political decisions he thought were folly hearkened back to his 1968 embrace of Nixon. What were the lives of Vietnamese, Cambodians, or Iraqis compared to Kissinger’s opportunity to help shape history?
Whatever bitterness Kissinger, in his final days, experienced over the erosion of his enterprise is little comfort to his millions of victims. America denied them the closure Kathleen Treanor experienced when America, declaring justice, ended Timothy McVeigh
(Spencer Ackerman (born June 1, 1980) is an American journalist and writer. Focusing primarily on national security, he began his career at The New Republic in 2002 before writing for Wired, The Guardian and The Daily Beast.
He won a 2012 National Magazine Award for reporting on biased FBI training materials and shared in a 2014 Pulitzer Prize for his coverage of the 2013 global surveillance disclosures. His book Reign of Terror: How the 9/11 Era Destabilized America and Produced Trump was named a best nonfiction book of 2021 by The New York Times, The Washington Post and Foreign Policy.)
