Washington

Henry Kissinger once called Zbigniew Brzezinski a "total whore", the Washington Post revealed. His legacy in Washington's foreign policy lives on after Afghanistan, today in Ukraine.

In 2012, Micah Zenko, the Douglas Dillon fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations noted internal discussions on the energy crisis of 1974-1980, including a March 1976 meeting of top US Gerald Ford administration officials: Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger, National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft and others.

In one conversation, Scowcroft, 87, remarked: “I understand [Jimmy Carter] has got [Zbigniew] Brzezinski working for him. That won’t help him very much.”

Kissinger answered: ”Brzezinski is a total whore. He’s been on every side of every argument. He wrote a book on “Peaceful Engagement” [in 1965] and now that we are doing most of what he said in the book, he charges us with weakness.”

The Washington Post e-mailed Brzezinski, then 84, for comment about Kissinger calling him “a total whore”. Brzezinski laughed off the insult: “Henry is a friend of mine — he must have meant ‘bore.’”

At another meeting, on December 9, 1974, Kissinger was still displeased. “We have all of these eunuchs from David Rockefeller’s Trilateral Commission running around town saying that we are trying to confront the Arabs. . . . I don’t know whatever possessed me to give those idiots my blessing.” Kissinger was once again talking about Brzezinski’s circle, describing them in the most unflattering terms.

Zbigniew Brzezinski’s ascent to power in shaping US foreign policy came after the US defeat at the hands of the National Liberation Front of Vietnam. With over 58 000 US military fatalities, America was forced to withdraw from Southeast Asia. In light of this historic defeat, the strategy of all-out war including troop deployment, was reconsidered.

During his presidency, Jimmy Carter described himself as a student of Brzezinski’s, and appointed the Polish-American strategist to the White House as his chief adviser. Carter pardoned US army conscripts who had fled to Canada, welcomed Chinese President Deng Xiaoping for an extended tour in the US, and crafted a new image of the US on the advice of “Zbig” as he was known to his friends.

Russian President Putin pointed out that Brzezinski had consciously copied the rhetorical style and foreign policy messaging of the Soviet Union, to portray the United States, not as imperialist, but as “aiding revolutionaries” who fought for “human rights”.

Brzezinski’s strategy consisted of using the CIA instead of the Pentagon to create instability and chaos in countries where governments had defied Washington and, more importantly, on fake news. For decades, the American news media misled readers in reporting US relations toward Afghanistan, Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould pointed out.

From 1981 on, they noted, the press has kept vital information away from the American people. “For almost 30 years – ever since we got a close-in view of it – American press coverage of Afghanistan has been simplistic, misleading, unexamining, accepting and echoing government propaganda, and just plain wrong,” they say.

Articles in the New York Post by Janet Wilson in late 1989 and a Columbia Journalism Review article by Mary Williams Walsh in early 1990 charged that CBS newscasts repeatedly aired fake battle footage and false news accounts. The accusations incredibly, had no effect and caused no serious questioning by the media.

It wasn’t until 9/11 that Afghanistan got back on the media’s radar. The crisis had left 2 million dead, 6 million refugees, and Afghan women in abject conditions. “The American media not only missed the deeper story, but ignored numerous instances where the Afghan story had been corrupted for political purposes,” Fitzgerald and Gould say.

“Even when both Robert Gates, America’s former Secretary of Defense, and Zbigniew Brzezinski, Carter’s national security adviser, admitted in print (Gates, in his book, From the Shadows; Brzezinski, 1998 interview in Le Nouvel Observateur), that the US had been secretly undermining its own diplomatic efforts in order to give the Soviets their own Vietnam in Afghanistan, the American press failed to see it as news.” Gates had been a special assistant to Brzezinski in 1979 at the time of the invasion and had held high intelligence positions in the CIA in the early 80s and in 1986 was named deputy director of the CIA.

“Our personal experience with the media was an excellent example of how the Afghanistan story was framed to encourage war and to downplay peaceful settlement. Like the cold war itself, it is a framework that still haunts Afghanistan. Perhaps it has now come to haunt the United States even more,” they added.

Sara Flounders, co-director of former US Attorney General Ramsey Clark’s International Action Center, noted that US intervention in Afghanistan was not, as is widely believed, a response to Soviet action, saying: “It should be remembered that Brzezinski bragged that US intervention pre-dated Soviet’s 1979 assistance to the Afghan government.”

In 2015, Brzezinski told German magazine Spiegel, that the US should take on Putin in Ukraine. “We should make it more costly for the Russians to use force,” he said in an interview. “I think it makes sense to give defensive weapons to the Ukrainians, like mortars and anti-tank rockets, for the defense of major cities. If you want to take over a large country, you have to take the big cities. And taking big cities is extremely expensive if people are willing to defend it.”

“Europe is America’s essential geopolitical bridgehead in Eurasia… A wider Europe and an enlarged NATO will serve the short-term and longer-term interests of US policy… A politically defined Europe is also essential to Russia’s assimilation into a system of global cooperation,” Brzezinski noted in an article titled ‘A Geostrategy for Eurasia’, Foreign Affairs, 76:5, September/October 1997.

Brzezinski’s tactic of heavily funding and arming anti-government forces and then promoting them in international media with rhetoric about “human rights” is now a permanent feature of US foreign policy.

In his 1997 book, The Grand Chessboard he wrote, “Ukraine, a new and important space on the Eurasian chessboard, is a geopolitical pivot because its very existence as an independent country helps to transform Russia. Without Ukraine, Russia ceases to be a Eurasian empire.”

“Ukraine, Azerbaijan, South Korea, Turkey and Iran play the role of critically important geopolitical pivots,” he wrote in the book viewed by many as a blueprint for US wars in the future.