Scathing on Thin Ice.

• Author: Jonas, George
• Position: Review

Christopher Hitchens, The Trial of Henry Kissinger (New York: Verso, 2001), 160 pp., $22.

ON MAY 29, 2001, French officials appeared at the Ritz Hotel in Paris with a summons for former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. It was issued by an examining magistrate at the request of William Bourdon, a lawyer representing the families of several French nationals who allegedly disappeared in General Augusto Pinochet's Chile. Maitre Bourdon wanted Dr. Kissinger to appear as a "witness" in the case.

Dr. Kissinger had no obligation, of course, to answer questions in the court of a crusading French magistrate. He flew on to Italy as scheduled, leaving it to the American embassy in France to explain to Judge Roger Le Loire that if he had any queries about U.S. government policy in Latin America during the Pinochet years, he should ask them of the State Department.

The Left was nevertheless jubilant. "When the names of former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet and former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger popped up intertwined in the news last week, it was a magical moment for human rights activists worldwide", enthused Marc Cooper in the June 3 Los Angeles Times. A contributing editor of The Nation and a former translator for the late Chilean president, Salvador Allende, Cooper evidently felt that the most recent turn in the comedy that started with Spanish Judge Baltasar Garzon's attempt to extradite General Pinochet from London, then continued this spring with the publication of Christopher Hitchens' The Trial of Henry Kissinger, was making the Left's guerrilla theater a smash hit worldwide.

The spirit behind Europe's grandstanding magistrates (and Mr. Hitchens' book) is manifested particularly in the Netherlands, where war crimes trials are becoming something of an industry. Last year student "jurists" of a moot court in the renowned Hague Academy of International Law invited the press while they questioned an actor in the prisoners dock, wearing a cocked hat and a gold-studded coat.

"Are you Napoleon Bonaparte, born August 15, 1769, in Ajaccio, Corsica?"

"How do you plead?"

"Oui!"

"Non coupable!"

On this particular day, the moot court failed to find enough evidence that Napoleon set fire to Moscow, and thus acquitted him of war crimes and crimes against humanity. The actor in the cocked hat looked relieved. However, as the Times of India pointed out, the mock trial "offered a flavour of what may be in store for tomorrow's leaders--and not only megalomaniac dictators."

Kissinger himself anticipated the use to which Pinochet-type precedents would be put by partisans of political causes, in courts both moot and real. "If generally applied", he wrote in the Los Angeles Times in December 2000, "[such doctrines] would legitimize ad hoc procedures and standards invented for the arrest of suspects, their extradition and eventual trials, and thus grant limitless license to ambitious national prosecutors or for the settling of political scores."

Kissinger was soon proved correct. In The Trial of Henry Kissinger, published this spring by Versa, the imprint of New Left Books, Hitchens sets out to settle political scores with gusto. He begins by offering the view that Kissinger's "manners are. . . rather gross" and that "his single greatest achievement has been to get almost everybody to call him 'Doctor."' Not a flattering portrait, but it does follow an internal logic if one is attempting, as Hitchens is, to build a case against one of the most significant statesmen of the 20th century as a war criminal.

Suggesting that Kissinger--a scholar and administrator who, as former National Security Advisor and Secretary of State to Presidents Nixon and Ford, had been the chief architect of detente with the Soviet Union, disengagement in Vietnam, and rapprochement with China--is a war criminal is not easy. (Considering Kissinger's policies of accommodation with various communist powers, it would be easier to suggest that he is a peace criminal.) The accusation gets no less nonsensical as Hitchens proceeds to elaborate on his charges, accusing Kissinger of criminally actionable sins in South and Southeast Asia, Cyprus, East Timor, Greece and, of course, Chile. In every locale Hitchens is scathing, but he is everywhere scathing on thin ice.

HITCHENS WASTES no time in coming to the point. In the first chapter, he levels a key accusation against Kissinger: that to advance his own career, the future national security advisor played a...