Realpolitik: The Policy of Graveyards

     A phantom is haunting American foreign policy.  This phantom facilitated the unholy collusion of private and public power into a unitary destructive force.  Dozens of nations and thousands of people swept into ruin by the phantom’s haphazard charge toward its ultimate goal of power.  That phantom is Henry Kissinger and his bastard brain child of realpolitik.  Realpolitik is an ideology that tears down the curtain of decency and morality and bring to front stage the raw pursuit of power.  Democracy, transparency and human rights become obstacles to be crushed.  In George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, the character O’Brien, a member of Oceania’s ruling totalitarian party, says, “if you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face – forever.”  Realpolitik is that boot.  Realpolitik seeks only power for power’s sake.  It uses corporations and bureaucracies to build a mountain of innocent bodies to stand on top of, and one builds up the body count better than Henry Kissinger.

     Henry Kissinger was Richard Nixon and later Gerald Ford’s National Security Advisor from 1969-1975, and later Secretary of State from 1973-1977 (from 1973-1975 he held both positions simultaneously).  During his tenure, Kissinger oversaw the prolonging of the Vietnam War for sole political gains, the support of military dictatorships in South America that disappeared some 80,000 suspected leftists, the betrayal of the Kurdish people to Saddam Hussein among other war crimes.  This is not to say the US did not engage in coups and other sordid affairs before Kissinger, but he attempt to hide behind any veil of democracy or fight against communism .  Many more educated and intelligent people have written volumes about Kissinger and his crimes against humanity, and I recommend to every American who cares about their country’s place in the world to read them (I particularly recommend Christopher Hitchens’ The Trail of Henry Kissinger).

     Kissinger left the federal government after the failed Presidencies of Nixon and Ford.  Reagan’s presidency saw a brief turn away from realpolitik.  Realpolitikers previously sought detente with the Soviet Union and Communist China in order to preserve the global order that benefited the powerful.  Reagan, however, sought the ultimate defeat of Soviet Communism as his goal.  Despite the different ambitions, Reagan, like the Realpolitikers before him, committed the same acts of aggression and support of jack boot third world dictatorships.  However, Kissinger’s phantoms continued to haunt the White House, coming to prominence under the George W Bush administration.  They are non other than the notorious Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld.  Both saw their starts under the Nixon and Ford administrations, well under the tutelage of Kissinger, and like Kissinger, should be behind bars for the rest of their lives for gross crimes of aggression.

     Cheney and Rumsfeld were the prime architects of the disastrous 2003 Iraq War.  The Iraq War was about regional dominance of the Middle East by the US, not about liberating the Iraqi people.  To be clear,  Saddam Hussein was a horrible monster that should never have ruled over anybody.  But, he had no tangible connections to al-Qaida and no weapons of mass destruction.  Only when he posed a threat to US control in the region did his human rights abuses deserve mentioning by those like Cheney and Rumsfeld.  In fact, during Donald Rumsfeld’s appointment to Special Envoy to the Middle East by Reagan, he shook hands and dealt with Saddam Hussein.  During the Reagan years, Iraq had attacked the newly founded Islamic Republic of Iran to take advantage of its fragile post-revolutionary state.  The enemy of my enemy is my friend, and the US eagerly helped Saddam with indirect weapons sales, military training and giving biological weapons. 

     However, when Saddam threatened the status quo of the middle east during his invasion of Kuwait and eyeing the House of Saud did the US begin to decry Saddam as the dictator he always was.  Eventually, the US did finally remove Saddam to solidify US hegemony in the region, a region rich with oil.  Had it been the Korean Peninsula that sat upon enormous oil reserves, the US would have invaded the Hermit Kingdom.  9/11 provided an easy excuse for Cheney and Rumsfeld to concoct a story to justify their previously planned Iraqi invasion.

     The same can be said about Iran.  Right wing war games denounce the numerous human rights abuses of Iran.  The accusations are largely accurate.  Iran has a repressive and reprehensible government that is a direct threat to its own people.  However, you never hear the Iran bashing politicians say a word about the gross human rights violations of Saudi Arabia.  Both Iran and Saudi Arabia are in the top three death penalty states, only behind only China, according to Amnesty International https://www.amnesty.org/en/documents/act50/0001/2015/en/ .  Both nations use the GOP’s favorite non existing threat to America threat, repressive Sharia Law.  Saudi Arabia is our ally,, so human rights violations are okay.  The second the Saudis cross us; Senator McCain will joyfully sing about bombing them.

     That is how realpolitik has hurt US standing in the world.  It is a dangerous ideology that deserves to be cast aside and its practitioners brought before the International Criminal Court.  We need to use our standing as the most powerful country in the world to promote peace, human rights and global solidarity. Americans must reject this horrid ideology of “realism,” and live in peace with the rest of the world.