by Rainer Chlodwig von K.

RICHARD NIXON’S foreign policy guru Henry Kissinger is frequently categorized as a proponent of realpolitik — a “realist” in international relations — as opposed to a Zionist or a neoconservative; but, while Kissinger’s aims and those of the neoconservatives have not always been identical, it would be a mistake not to take Kissinger’s Jewishness into consideration as a factor in the Middle East policies he devised for the Nixon administration.

Kissinger’s sympathy for the Zionist project came to the fore more than once, somewhat subtly with regard to Israel’s nuclear weapons program. A declassified 1969 memorandum reveals that Kissinger acknowledged a nuclear Israel as a destabilizing development; but, as Patrick Slattery parses the document, it also shows America’s national security advisor to lurk somewhere in the vicinity of the Israelis’ corner in the deliberations.

[…] it becomes apparent upon reading the documents that while the gentiles in the administration wanted to halt Israel’s nuclear weapons development, Kissinger (the National Security Advisor and the administration’s most high-profile Jew) actually restrained the administration from using its considerable leverage to halt the Israeli nuclear program and instead successfully championed the policy of accepting Israel as a de facto nuclear weapons state as long as it made no public declarations of its possession of nuclear weapons and allowed the United States to maintain plausible deniability of knowledge of Israeli nukes. […] Kissinger writes that the representatives of the State Department, the Defense Department, and the Joint Chiefs of Staff concurred in wanting to demand the Israelis to “Give us assurances in writing that it will stop production and will not deploy ‘Jericho’ missiles or any other nuclear capable strategic missile.” However, Kissinger then immediately states parenthetically that “I do not believe we can ask Israel not to produce missiles. Israel is sovereign in this decision, and I do not see how we can ask it not to produce a weapon just because we do not see it as an effective weapon without nuclear warheads.” Kissinger has had no trouble, however, advocating for interference in Iran’s sovereign decisions. […] This is yet another illustration of the fact that the essence of Jewish power is the ability to stifle any discussion of Jewish power.1

Later, as secretary of state, Kissinger would recommend a course with dire consequences for the American economy. Muhammad Idrees Ahmad summarizes the secretary’s response to the Yom Kippur War of 1973:

King Faisal of Saudi Arabia and his oil minister Sheikh Yamani had both warned the Nixon Administration that because of its unstinting support for Israel, US oil companies “would lose everything”. Oil companies panicked and Exxon, Mobil and SoCal all took out ads in newspapers advising Nixon against antagonising the Arabs. Jack McCloy, the lawyer for the “Seven Sisters”, warned Kissinger before the war that “the Administration must not think just in terms of the next New York election”. Once the war started, OPEC responded by imposing a comprehensive oil embargo. The price of oil jumped from $3.02 per barrel in October to $11.65 by December, and the crisis precipitated a wave of nationalisations, beginning with Saddam Hussein’s confiscation of US shares in the Basra Petroleum Company.2

Whether swayed by domestic political considerations or by a hidden Zionist affinity, however, Kissinger in the event demonstrated that the demands of organized Jewry meant more to him than the consensus in the defense establishment or opinion in the business community.

[…] under Richard Nixon the US emphatically committed itself to arming Israel. US strategic concerns had no bearing on this decision. It was as much due to Nixon’s cynical ploy to deflect pressure form the Watergate investigations, and Henry Kissinger’s Machiavellian machinations, as the lobby’s arm-twisting. Kissinger had advanced to the position of secretary of state by repeatedly undercutting his predecessor William Rogers, who sought Israel’s withdrawal from the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT) and, like Nixon, worried that Israeli intransigence was undermining US oil security. When the war started, Nixon and Defense Secretary James Schlesinger had no intention to intervene; they argued that the US had an obligation to defend Israel but not to defend Israel’s conquests. Egypt was merely trying to recover its own territory. But Kissinger — whose Zionism, according to [journalist Patrick] Tyler, formed “the bedrock of [his] view of the Middle East” — raised a false alarm that other Arab armies were about to join the war against Israel and contravened Nixon, who wanted to engage the Soviets in a joint ceasefire proposal. Kissinger deliberately fomented a superpower confrontation and encouraged Israeli leaders to ignore Nixon’s call for restraint to buy Israel time to secure better ceasefire terms and to finish off Egypt’s besieged 3rd Army. Finally, he misled Nixon about Soviet intentions and exaggerated domestic pressure to get approval for a massive arms shipment to Israel as a response to this “Russian treachery”. Tyler observes that Kissinger was manoeuvering “as if he were a partisan for Israel’s war aims” and “his actions throughout the crisis added up to a focused advocacy more for Israel’s strategic goals than for those of the United States”. “Kissinger’s duplicity was so plain”, he concludes, as “to raise questions of constitutional propriety, not to mention loyalty.” After the war, Kissinger also arbitrarily raised the level of US aid to Israel to $2.2 billion — a provocation that compelled the otherwise pliant King Faisal of Saudi Arabia to announce a comprehensive oil embargo. For the US the war was a disaster. Not only because it depleted US weapons stocks, leading to the near-resignation of the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff George S. Brown, but also because of its wider economic impact from which the US would take nearly a decade to recover.3

Again, Kissinger’s Zionism, to the extent that he exhibited it, was inconsistently evidenced over the years; but it is interesting to note that in 2002 he would encourage regime change to counter “Iraq’s capacity to cooperate with terrorist groups”4 and that Kissinger became President Bush’s initial appointee to head the 9/11 Commission in December of that same year5. It is enough to make one wonder aloud whatever became of that vaunted “realism” for which the former secretary of state is so famous.

Endnotes

Slattery, Patrick. “Kissinger’s Role in Gaining U.S. Acceptance of Israeli Nukes a Case Study in Zio Manipulation” DavidDuke.com (August 22, 2015): http://davidduke.com/51751/ Ahmad, Muhammad Idrees. The Road to Iraq: The Making of a Neoconservative War. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014, p. 198. Ibid., p. 193. Kissinger, Henry. “Iraq Is Becoming Bush’s Most Difficult Challenge”. Chicago Tribune (August 11, 2002): http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2002-08-11/news/0208110058_1_regime-change-pre-emptive-action-iraq Roberts, Joel. “Kissinger to Head 9/11 Commission”. CBS News (December 12, 2002): http://www.cbsnews.com/news/kissinger-to-head-9-11-commission/

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Source: Aryan Skynet