The Middle East & Henry Kissinger, an Introductory Overv

[norton ash]

I think the thesis is that an amoral, chimerical, sociopathic rat bastard is the ultimate hemi engine of a 50-year neocon agenda.

PNAC and the MI Complex likes Israel, and Israel likes PNAC and the MI Complex. Kissinger served to vastly enrich that relationship.

Now there are permanent bases in Iraq, and there will be in Afghanistan, and the centre of the chess board will stay white-hot.

Good class. I'm going for a toke, anyoine join me?

[American Dream]

Searcher08 wrote:

Why don't YOU give a response to what Alice wrote instead of all this nonsense?

I have given several responses. Here are some excerpts:

If I were going to guess, I'd say that the thesis of this paper has something to do with Henry Kissinger and "the zionists" (whatever that might mean in this context), but beyond that I wouldn't want to distort the argument being made by assuming too much about what the general thesis actually is, in error.

What is the overall thesis of this piece?

How do you expect the reader to evaluate your argument if the thesis isn't clear?

Otherwise, while you may take the reader on a kind of journey- "Oh look- Kissinger was a immoral statesman!", "Look over there- were Jews involved in making that decision!" "Over there- Israel benefited from an action of the United States!", et cetera, it won't make for a presentation that we can really engage with using all our faculties.

Yes, but Alice has been explicitly asked to connect those dots by summarizing the thesis of this (19 page?) piece, rather than giving us a series of excerpts that seems to be veering towards the "popcorn" approach that she criticizes in others.

But Kissinger is one element of a larger picture. What does that picture illustrate? A monolithic and highly centralized World Zionist Conpiracy? And one that is presently running the whole planet?

These kinds of issues do matter, much more than how many "true facts" might make up any one aspect of the story being told...

[erosoplier]

Maybe you can tell us what the thesis of this "overv" is, erosoplier?

It isn't very fashionable these days, but I'm all for simplicity. If someone can display a mastery of a certain topic by using a few brief words to express the essence of it, or the import of it, then I'm all for it, generally speaking. And in a different situation, I can imagine asking Alice myself what all of her 19 pages should mean for those of us standing on the sidelines. But I'd ask mainly because I value her opinion, not because I'm incapable of forming one of my own, and certainly not for some other ulterior motive. And I'd ask because I believe a desire to get at the truth is often all that is required to turn the process of simplifying complex situations into a worthwhile activity.

But Alice has only just recently expressed horror at the trend these days for people to grasp at simple-minded appreciations of vastly complex situations. And I must admit, there's that side of this whole situation too. So on those grounds alone, I would readily cede to Alice the right to let complex situations be exactly as complex as they are, and not a jot less.

And apart from that, even if she were happy to answer questions such as those you ask, she has no interest in answering them for you, given that she doesn't trust your motives, AD. It's hard to get at the truth when you can't even trust the motives of a person you are discussing the matter-at-hand with. So I think you should try engaging with the material itself, and find fault with it directly, if that is what you seek to do. Because if your goal is to simply to find fault with Alice, you should hardly expect her to gratefully assist you in your efforts.

*

P.S. I didn't bump the thread to provoke a response from Jack. I really don't see that this should be all about Alice and Jack, or Alice and AD. I really did just think that the OP deserved a better response than it got, and that, come to think of it, DE would at least have posted reams of material in the process of attempting to impugn Alice's motives, and not just attempted to impugn her motives sans reams of material, or requested that she provide brief additional motive-impugning statements which can then be used as evidence that her motives are impugnable...

[American Dream]

I'm guessing that the point of the piece is something like what I have suggested- but apparently nobody here knows for sure what the point really is, since the author hasn't yet told us.

That said, if the thesis is indeed along these lines, I'd have to say- based on what we've all read here so far- that the case being made fails miserably...

[AlicetheKurious]

erosoplier said:

...even if she were happy to answer questions such as those you ask, she has no interest in answering them for you, given that she doesn't trust your motives, AD. It's hard to get at the truth when you can't even trust the motives of a person you are discussing the matter-at-hand with. So I think you should try engaging with the material itself, and find fault with it directly, if that is what you seek to do.

Very true.

First, I not only don't trust AD, I find his characteristically pretentious regurgitation of other people's thoughts tiresome and boring, whether in the form of continuously 'cutting and pasting' articles with no commentary, or his intellectually bankrupt habit of substituting ad hominem insinuations for intelligent debate.

As for Jack, I'm just disappointed that he has chosen to ignore this thread, despite the fact that he inspired it to some extent, and that it directly responds to claims that he has made in the past. Also, with all due respect to everyone here, I think Jack is one of the very few with the background to fully appreciate the significance of the information in my OP, some of which is either unknown or deliberately left out in almost all histories of the region. This includes (among other things) specifically how Kissinger insinuated himself into a position to deliberately sabotage American peace negotiations in Vietnam, at a catastrophic cost to the people of that country, its neighbors and the United States; the way he was able to maneuver himself into becoming, during a critical period in America's history, unelected dictator of the United States; his engineering of the 1973 War, in the process dragging the entire world to the brink of a nuclear confrontation; and his central role in the drastic rise of the price of oil, the cornerstone of a devious plot to effectively enslave much of what we call the Third World, which also, as a bonus, served as a convenient pretext to promote hatred of Arabs.

When these and other highly revealing facts are taken into consideration, and when Kissinger's activities in the Middle East are related to what he was doing in the White House, in Indochina and elsewhere, all the separate pieces of Kissinger's ubiquitous role during the fateful decade between 1967 and 1977 suddenly fit seamlessly together like the pieces of a puzzle to form a global picture that makes perfect, if terrifying, sense.

It's incredible that with all the books and articles published in the mainstream media about Henry Kissinger, there is none, as far as I know, that even considers the possibility that this man, who has done arguably more than any other single actor to promote Israel's regional hegemony and emergence as a global power, was not only serving "big oil", or Rockefeller, or "US elite" interests, but that above all, he was effectively using all of these to promote zionist interests.

If we eliminate the zionist agenda which he has served so consistently for so long (and whose minions have served him, by glamorizing him and diverting attention away from his trail of corpses), Kissinger then becomes a complete enigma: an anti-communist "hawk of hawks" who was suspected, with good reason, of being a Soviet spy, among other things; a Jew who frequently brings up the Holocaust in defense of zionism, but who, as CIA translator from "Army Intelligence" devised the "Ratline" by which thousands of Nazi war criminals were secreted away to the U.S. and Argentina under Operation Paperclip. Kissinger, who along with rabid neocon Michael Ledeen, has been deeply implicated in the "Stay Behind" global network of false-flag terrorist cells, claims not to be a "neocon" while sticking to the very letter of the neocon agenda (and even echoing its terminology). On the very day of September 11, 2001:

"This is comparable to Pearl Harbor, and we must have the same response, and the people who did it must have the same end as the people who attacked Pearl Harbor,'' former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger told CNN.

Kissinger is the man who has been magically aided and abetted in parlaying a career of war crimes and spectacular failure after failure, doing more to destroy America's global standing over decades than any other man, into a reputation as a "great American statesman". It's not an exaggeration to say that the impact of his career of impunity on the United States as a nation has been disastrous. One by one, he has used and betrayed every one of his "friends", but one: Israel. And the zionists have returned the favor. As the ultimate proof of how a complicit media can transform the most revolting sow's ear into a silk purse, this physically and morally repulsive man (I've seen him, close up) has even been described as a "sex symbol". Ugh.

Anyway. For those who still haven't figured out my "thesis", I've already provided a summary, in the last few paragraphs of the OP. I have no idea how to make it any simpler or more obvious:


Anyway, back to Henry Kissinger. We've only scratched the surface of his key role in shaping the current realities of the Middle East, and already this is a mammoth post. I believe even a book would not be enough to do Henry Kissinger justice.

I find it fascinating that so many 'analysts' insist that Kissinger is not a zionist, but merely a servant to American elite interests. On the contrary, I view Kissinger as an uber-zionist whose incredible, perhaps unequaled contributions to Israeli hegemony have been made possible precisely because he has deliberately packaged them in a way calculated to appeal to U.S. elite interests. Whenever 'elite' interests conflicted with Israel's hegemonic interests, Kissinger invariably ensured that the latter would prevail. As one example, whose interests were served when Kissinger hijacked the U.S. presidency and put the U.S. armed forces on global nuclear alert, just to ensure that Israel would be free to continue violating the ceasefire agreement that America had formulated?

His apparent collusion with Sadat and the Soviets during the run-up to the 1973 War may look to some like a 'betrayal' of Israel, but in fact it has turned out to be the best thing that ever happened to that shitty little country. Without the 1973 War "shaking things up," as Kissinger described it, the War of Attrition would have most likely continued until Israel was exhausted and forced to withdraw from the 1967 territories. Already during the brief time the War of Attrition was allowed to continue, Israel was registering the kind of heavy, regular losses that can only be compared to those of the last days of Israel's occupation of southern Lebanon, which forced it to withdraw in 2000.

Instead, as a consequence of the 1973 War and the subsequent Camp David Agreement, the Arab front was deprived of its most important member state, and Kissinger's “friend” Sadat threw wide open the gates of Egypt to the economic hit-men, the Wahhabists flush with dollars, the spooky terrorists, the Israeli spies and the corrupt lackeys with delusions of grandeur for whom Kissinger so carefully and meticulously paved the way.

Bottom line: what Kissinger accomplished for Israel during his frenzy of activity in the period before, during and after the 1973 War is nothing less than the elimination or neutralization of every element that threatened Israel prior to the 1973 War:

-the Arab Front was politically fragmented and demoralized;

-the Soviet Union was no longer Egypt's ally or arming Egypt;

-by neutralizing Israel’s most formidable opponent, Egypt, Camp David freed Israel’s hands to pursue its bloody expansionist policies in the Occupied territories and southern Lebanon;

-the United Nations had been sidelined and replaced by Kissinger himself (followed by a long succession of zionist “Middle East foreign policy experts”) as "peace broker";

-international law was fatally undermined, no longer considered relevant to "Middle East Peace";

-the movement for Non-Aligned States was de facto destroyed;

-the War of Attrition not only was called off, it could never be re-started, because its parties were now actively hostile to and suspicious of each other;

-Israel had returned the Sinai, which it had illegally occupied in 1967, but contrary to international law, it was returned with a series of conditions that allowed Israel to continue to benefit from it, and others that undermined Egypt's sovereignty over its own territory.

Not bad for a "non-zionist".

[American Dream]

AlicetheKurious wrote:

intellectually bankrupt habit of substituting ad hominem insinuations for intelligent debate

Alice, are you blind to yourself?

[Searcher08]

AlicetheKurious wrote:

intellectually bankrupt habit of substituting ad hominem insinuations for intelligent debate

Alice, are you blind to yourself?

The scary thing about that statement is it's utter lack of irony.

Glass houses, stones and all that....

[American Dream]

Hmm, so you're acknowledging that Alice does this and excusing it in the same breath?

[Searcher08]

Hmm, so you're acknowledging that Alice does this and excusing it in the same breath?

No, I'm saying that IMHO you are blind to behaviours of yours which are arrogant and create an experience of distrust in several people (self included) here.

You post a lot of links here which are valuable, but which for me have a noticeable missing element - *your* opinion on it. You are becoming a human RSS feed.

You profess to fly the critical thinking flag, yet don't seem to reflect about your own thinking. I often have felt that you really put words in my mouth and attribute to me things and motivations which are not mine.

To me you come across as having an 'approved list' and if some topic veers too near the 'danger!!!11!!!1 zone" then the person who raised it gets shitcanned.

Dr Doogie explained it much better than me in his post on you requiring 'litmus tests'. I make my own mind up on content and I don't care where it comes from - I'm confident in my unconscious ability to make useful maps of the cognitive territory I am in and confident in the people on RI being able to do the same, but it seems to be a confidence that you do not share.


When you yourself said you see the issue of eg islamophobia as much more widespread and important in the US than anti-Semitism, yet subscribe to Alice being St0rmfrent Lite, my reaction is Huh?! Whut?


Not all good thinking takes place in a thesis/antithesis/synthesis form - there is also design thinking, there is map-making thinking, there is values exploration. I found reading Alice's essay a really valuable education on many aspects of Kissinger, a character at the centre of gravity of many important events in the 20th cent. and you are not responding to what she raises on it's own level, which (purely as a courtesy from the amount of work it took!) is a bit feeble to me -

Finally,

And apart from that, even if she were happy to answer questions such as those you ask, she has no interest in answering them for you, given that she doesn't trust your motives, AD. It's hard to get at the truth when you can't even trust the motives of a person you are discussing the matter-at-hand with. So I think you should try engaging with the material itself, and find fault with it directly, if that is what you seek to do. Because if your goal is to simply to find fault with Alice, you should hardly expect her to gratefully assist you in your efforts.

deserves a response.

[American Dream]

I think that my response is pretty clear and most of it has been stated here in various iterations:


I can't tell what this piece is supposed to "prove". I see various snippets of information, which seem to be leading somewhere, and I can hazard a guess where they are going, based on what I have read previously of Alice's view of the world.

However, since Alice has declined to state what her thesis is, I can only wrestle here with shadows and say that I don't think the information given presents a very compelling argument for the case which I'd guess that Alice is trying to make.

On top of that, I find it absolutely amazing that she now says she is waiting for Jack Riddler, since when he did engage with her she studiously ignored many of his questions for her, and indeed many/most points he made that did present a cogent counterpoint to her argument.

Instead of coherent argument and rational discussion things often get overly personalized here. One of the most annoying ways that this happens in this particular context is the way that Alice agent-baits me when I'm pointing out that her argument is weak in a certain way. I think that this is taking the easy way out- don't really respect such ploys, and they're never going to stop me from expressing myself when I see something that seems really wrong.


So we seem to be at an impasse...

[SonOfKitty]

A.d, you and Jack have never been so silent. A response please with some facts. You must know something about Kissinger?

[vigilant]

I think that my response is pretty clear and most of it has been stated here in various iterations:


I can't tell what this piece is supposed to "prove". I see various snippets of information, which seem to be leading somewhere, and I can hazard a guess where they are going, based on what I have read previously of Alice's view of the world.

However, since Alice has declined to state what her thesis is, I can only wrestle here with shadows and say that I don't think the information given presents a very compelling argument for the case which I'd guess that Alice is trying to make.

On top of that, I find it absolutely amazing that she now says she is waiting for Jack Riddler, since when he did engage with her she studiously ignored many of his questions for her, and indeed many/most points he made that did present a cogent counterpoint to her argument.

Instead of coherent argument and rational discussion things often get overly personalized here. One of the most annoying ways that this happens in this particular context is the way that Alice agent-baits me when I'm pointing out that her argument is weak in a certain way. I think that this is taking the easy way out- don't really respect such ploys, and they're never going to stop me from expressing myself when I see something that seems really wrong.


So we seem to be at an impasse...

I see nothing has changed in this little corner of the world...

"when you can't fight the message, attack the messenger, and see if you can bait other to do the same"....

impasse? you fell into your own pass a long time ago...

[OP ED]

Hmm, so you're acknowledging that Alice does this and excusing it in the same breath?

No, I'm saying that IMHO you are blind to behaviours of yours which are arrogant and create an experience of distrust in several people (self included) here.

indeed. was exactly what i was planning to say. Pots and Kettles, etc.

you're silly sometimes AD. Clearly, you cannot be simultaneously pointing out weaknesses in her arguments and failing to understand what her arguments are. Given that this is clearly true, your behavior comes across as a pattern of disruption and little more.

[American Dream]

This is what I said in my last post:

I can't tell what this piece is supposed to "prove". I see various snippets of information, which seem to be leading somewhere, and I can hazard a guess where they are going, based on what I have read previously of Alice's view of the world.

However, since Alice has declined to state what her thesis is, I can only wrestle here with shadows and say that I don't think the information given presents a very compelling argument for the case which I'd guess that Alice is trying to make.

In other words, I'd be making an educated guess as to what her point is.

[OP ED]

why does it have to have a "point" before you can interact with the information presented?

why so intent on "proving" something?