WHAT YOU DID NOT KNOW ABOUT HENRY KISSINGER!
Kissinger
sought 'small friendly' Israel. Kissinger-era foreign policy papers reveal
details of US politician's talks with then Iraqi FM
On the evening of February 17,
1973,Chairman Mao Zedong met with Dr. Henry Kissinger, national security
adviser to the president of the United States. During the Kissinger's visit
to China, both sides decided to set up a liaison office in each other's
capital to establish a direct link between the two countries. In May, the
liaison offices began to function.
The United States reached out to hostile Arabs three decades ago with an offer to work toward making Israel a ``small friendly country'' of no threat to its neighbors and with an assurance to Iraq that the U.S. had stopped backing Kurdish rebels in the north. ``We can't negotiate about the existence of Israel,'' then Secretary of State Henry Kissinger told his Iraqi counterpart in a rare high-level meeting, "but we can reduce its size to historical proportions.'' A December 1975 memo detailing Kissinger's probing conversation with Foreign Affairs Minister Saadoun Hammadi eight years after Iraq severed diplomatic relations with Washington is included in some 28,000 pages of Kissinger-era foreign policy papers published in an online collection Friday. George Washington University's National Security Archive released the collection, drawn from papers available at the government's National Archives and obtained through the group's Freedom of Information requests. In it, Kissinger tells Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai in June 1972 that the United States, mired in Vietnam, probably could live with a communist government in South Vietnam as long as that evolved peacefully. ``If we can live with a communist government in China, we ought to be able to accept it in Indochina,'' he said. He also hints that the United States, newly courting China, would consider a nuclear response if the Soviets were to overrun Asia with conventional forces. At the time, Chinese-Soviet tensions were sharp and the United States was playing one communist state against the other as best it could while seeking detente with its main rival, Moscow. But when the Japanese recognized China with what Kissinger called ``indecent haste,'' he branded them 'treacherous.''
The transcript of Kissinger's meeting with Hammadi in Paris sheds light on a
little known maneuver that spoke to America's broader effort to win friends in
the Arab world even as it was giving military support to the Jewish state. The
meeting was frank and open - diplomats' preferred description of any such
meeting but in this case, true. And Hammadi, a friend of the Soviets, was a
tough sell. "We are on the other side of the fence,'' he asserted." What the
United States is doing is not to create peace but to create a situation
dominated by Israel.'' Kissinger pressed: "Our attitude is not unsympathetic
to Iraq. Don't believe; watch it.'' He said U.S. public opinion was turning
more pro-Palestinian and U.S. aid to Israel could not be sustained for much
longer at its massive levels. He predicted that in 10 or 15 years, "Israel
will be like Lebanon - struggling for existence, with no influence in the Arab
world.'' Mindful of Israel's nuclear capability, a skeptical Hammadi peppered
Kissinger with questions, including whether Washington would recognize
Palestinian identity and even a Palestinian state. "Is it in your power to
create such a thing?'' Kissinger said he could not make recognition of
Palestinian identity happen right away but, "No solution is possible without
it. After a settlement, Israel will be a small friendly country,'' he said.
Israel returned the Sinai Peninsula, one of its territorial gains in the 1967
Six Day War, to Egypt in a 1979 peace deal. Current Prime Minister Ehud Olmert
has offered to give up at least part of the West Bank for a Palestinian state.
President Bush is the first U.S. president to call explicitly for creation of
a Palestinian state. Kissinger said U.S. officials had believed Iraq was a
Soviet satellite state but had come to a "more sophisticated understanding
now. We think you are a friend of the Soviet Union but you act on your own
principles.'' Saddam Hussein was then vice president, in control of internal
security and oil. When Hammadi persisted with complaints about U.S. support
for the Kurds, Kissinger brushed them off by saying, "One can do nothing about
the past. "Not always,'' Hammadi countered as the meeting closed and he
escorted Kissinger to the door. Washington and Baghdad renewed relations after
the start of the Iran-Iraq war; Hammadi became prime minister in the Saddam
era. The collection, also available in microfiche, consists of some 2,100
memoranda of Kissinger's secret conversations with senior officials abroad and
at home from 1969 to 1977, serving under presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald
Ford.
William Burr, senior analyst for the research group, said the papers are the
most extensive published record of Kissinger's work, in many cases offering
insight into matters that the diplomat ignored or merely touched on in his
prolific memoirs.