Kissinger: 9/11 altered global landscape
Former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger argued the case for President Bush's strategy of pre-emption to a near-capacity crowd Tuesday night at Heinz Hall, saying the terrorist attacks took away policymakers' options of waiting for threats to fully materialize or even waiting "to find out what assessment was right."
Elsewhere Downtown, author and columnist Christopher Hitchens introduced a movie based on his book arguing that Kissinger is a war criminal. About a dozen sign-toting protesters picketed outside Heinz Hall before Kissinger's speech to present that message.
Calling the post-Sept. 11 era "one of the most seminal upheavals in history," Kissinger, the first speaker in Robert Morris University's Pittsburgh Speakers Series, said international relations fundamentally changed when "private groups" supplanted whole nations as a threat.
Now, no matter who wins in November, "it is inevitable that any American president will have to try to prevent certain events" rather than waiting for a concrete threat and reacting to it.
Without naming either Republican Bush or Democratic presidential contender Sen. John Kerry, Kissinger also defended the multilateral nuclear nonproliferation talks with North Korea that Bush adopted. Kerry said in the presidential debate last Thursday that he favors direct negotiations between the United States and North Korea.
Hitchens, author of the book on which the documentary "The Trials of Henry Kissinger" is based, argues Kissinger should answer for alleged violations of some of the same international laws used to prosecute brutal Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet and former Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevich.
"The Trials of Henry Kissinger," an 80-minute film released in 2002 and screened concurrently with Kissinger's speech, was expected to sell out the Harris Theater, which seats about 200 people.
Kissinger ran the State Departments of Presidents Nixon and Ford. Supporters lavished praise on him for opening relations with China, brokering a Middle East peace deal after the 1973 Arab-Israeli war and negotiating an end to the Vietnam War, for which he won the Nobel Peace Prize.
Critics say Kissinger should be charged with war crimes for his alleged involvement in assassination attempts, genocide in East Timor and murders throughout South America and elsewhere.
The long-simmering controversy again flared with the release last week of transcripts of Kissinger's phone conversations while he was secretary of state. Kissinger, in the transcripts, suggests that subordinates should be punished for criticizing human rights violations committed by Chilean and Argentinian dictators.
Kissinger told reporters after a morning speech in Denver yesterday that he had been concerned about human rights abuses by people like Pinochet, but the U.S. government also had to support those regimes so communism didn't spread to South America.
Kissinger said he spoke against the abuses twice publicly and again in private conversations with Pinochet, according to The Associated Press.
