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Kissinger's foggy lens on Iran
By Kaveh L Afrasiabi
Henry Kissinger has thrown his shoulder behind the so-called "push-back" strategy being applied to the new US National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Iran's nuclear program. Specifically, he's even given hawks in the lame-duck George W Bush administration a helping hand in countering the backlash sparked by the NIE's most inconvenient finding - that Iran is not currently pursuing a nuclear weapons program.
Despite the decades which have passed since he served in the Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford administrations, former US secretary of state Kissinger is still considered one of the most prescient US observers of global affairs. His recent opinion pieces published in The Washington Post go a long way in fanning the flames of a perceived Iranian nuclear threat - at least at the level of American public opinion - now that much of the fear has been extinguished by the NIE's findings.

This is, in fact, so typical of Kissinger. He's long made a virtue out of rehashing old ideas and assumptions as refreshingly new simply through linguistic acrobatics intermixed with calibrated obfuscation. Such rhetoric is swathed in additional, artificial layers of semantic ambiguity and "double talk". Worse, Kissinger's trademark has long been to simultaneously embrace contradictory ideas and yet escape serious scrutiny in a thick fog of semantic wordplay.

As a result, Kissinger can be everything to everyone these days. He's at once an avid advocate of serious disarmament and also a powerful voice for a "strong American military" and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization's reliance on its nuclear arsenal. He's an enthusiastic supporter of various arms limitation treaties and also a reasonable voice for their reconsideration. He's a proponent of post-Cold War, post-hegemonic America and, equally, a principal architect of American primacy in the new global milieu (not to overlook his own singular contributions to the thesis of a "new Cold War" in the Middle East in recent publications in the Arab press).

 

It's nothing new: during the 1970s, Kissinger went to Baghdad and promised that the US would do everything possible "to reduce Israel's size", when, in fact, he never even waved a finger in that direction.
Kissinger now writes opinion columns about the perils of nuclear weapons without ever repudiating his earlier views. For example, in 1957, he wrote that "with proper tactics, nuclear war need not be as destructive as it appears".

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