We can't negotiate about the existence of Israel, but we can
reduce its size to historical proportions, Henry Kissinger, the
56th Secretary of State of the United States from 1973 to 1977,
told his Iraqi counterpart in a high-level meeting three decades
ago, according to a December 1975 memo presenting details of a
conversation between Kissinger and Foreign Affairs Minister Saadoun
Hammadi eight years after Iraq cut its ties with the U.S.
28,000 pages of Kissinger-era foreign policy papers published
Friday showed that Washington tried to reach out to Arabs three
decades ago, offering them help to make Israel a "small friendly
country" of no threat to the Middle East and assuring Iraq that the
U.S. would end its backing of Kurdish rebellion in the north.
Also according to the documents, released by George Washington
University's National Security Archive, Kissinger, who served as
national security adviser and secretary of state in the Nixon and
Ford administrations, told Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai in 1972 that
the United States could live with a communist government in South
Vietnam if that evolved peacefully.
If we can live with a communist government in China, we ought to
be able to accept it in Indochina,'' the documents, obtained
through the group's Freedom of Information requests, quoted
Kissinger as saying.
Kissinger moreover hinted at the possibility that the United States
would consider a nuclear response to stop the Soviets from
attempting to overrun Asia with conventional forces.
Highlighting U.S. efforts at that time to win friends in the Arab
world while it was aiding Israel militarily, the papers further
quoted Kissinger as saying:
We are on the other side of the fence, Kissinger said at that
time.
What the United States is doing is not to create peace but to
create a situation dominated by Israel.
Our attitude is not unsympathetic to Iraq. Don't believe; watch
it.
Israel will be like Lebanon - struggling for existence, with no
influence in the Arab world, said Kissinger, who also stated that
the U.S. public was more sympathetic with the Palestinians
struggle for independence, claiming that Washington was
reconsidering the huge amount of aid it gives the Jewish
State.
But Hammadi was still skepticalabout Kissingers claims. He asked
him whether the U.S. would recognize Palestinian identity and a
Palestinian state.
Is it in your power to create such a thing? Hammadi asked.
But Kissinger replied with a little bit maneuver, telling him that
he cant make recognition of Palestinian identity happen right
away.
No solution is possible without it, Kissinger said.
After a settlement, Israel will be a small friendly
country,
When Hammadi pressured Kissinger to grant Iraq support against the
Kurds, Kissinger brushed his complaints off; saying, One can do
nothing about the past.
Iraq revived its diplomatic ties with the U.S. right after the
beginning of the Iran-Iraq war; when Hammadi became Prime Minister
during Saddams rule.
An architect of Vietnam war more than 30 years ago, Kissinger was
quoted last year as saying that he has "a very uneasy feeling" that
some of the same factors that damaged support for U.S. aggression
in Vietnam are re-emerging in Iraq war.
"For me, the tragedy of Vietnam was the divisions that occurred in
the United States that made it, in the end, impossible to achieve
an outcome that was compatible with the sacrifices that had been
made," former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, who supported the
original decision to act against Iraq, was quoted as saying.
A few months ago, Kissinger appeared trying to justify a possible
U.S. military strike againt Iran to force it suspend its nuclear
program, which the U.S., backed by Israel, claims is being used as
a guise for hidden developments to produce nuclear weapons.
He said that if Iran produced nuclear weapons, nonproliferation may
cease to be a meaningful policy, and then we live in a world of
multiple nuclear centers. And then wed have to ask ourselves what
the world would look like if the [terrorist] bombs in London [on
July 7] had been nuclear and 100,000 people had been killed.
It is a grave step to tolerate a world of multiple nuclear weapons
centers without restraint. Im not recommending military action,
but Im recommending not excluding it.
