Amr Ababakr
In the first lines of the introduction to his most recent book, Leadership: Six Studies in World Strategy, which was released this summer in the Penguin Random House Publishers in New York; Former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger seems unintentionally, of course, to hand his anti-Kissinger reader and nine-tenths of his ideas, policies, and behaviors an eloquent opening key confirming the validity of opposing the book or even reluctance to read it. He writes: “Any society, whatever its political system, is in a state of constant transition between a past that shapes its memory and a vision of the future that inspires its development. Along these lines, leadership is indispensable: decisions to be made, trust earned, promises kept, and a way forward proposed.”
This is because the contradictions of all of these, and many others, in reality, remained the norms of ‘leadership’ that Kissinger assumed from very sensitive positions in American foreign policy: as National Security Adviser, Secretary of State, and architect of the agreement with the Soviet Union and China, and a driver in the Paris negotiations that established Conclusion/way out of decades of US war crimes in Vietnam. In addition, of course, to engineering military coups here and there in the world, especially Chile, against the democratically elected President Salvador Allende, complicity in the Heinous massacres in Pakistan and Bangladesh and here and there in the world as well, and raising the maximum nuclear alert in the White House without the knowledge of the president to pressure the Soviets and reverse the trend. The war on the Egyptian and Syrian fronts in 1973, etc. are many, varied, outrageous…
There is, therefore, a need for a principled critical perspective that is suitable to assist a reader of another type, which means standing on the basis of what Kissinger sees and what theorizes and foresees when he is 99 years old, and issues the 19th book of his books on international politics. But is it correct, first mentally, then critically, and morally, for the reader to follow what Kissinger gropes about these six, without arming himself with strict, highly discerning, and scrutiny filters that list the author’s sins against the very people whose politicians he analyzes?
‘At the heart of human institutions, states, religions, armies, corporations, and schools, leadership is dictated by the need to help people get from where they are to where they have never been before or where they rarely imagined reaching,’ Kissinger writes in an introduction to his conception of leadership. Not far away, the reader must keep recalling what the owner of these metaphorical representations reached when he led American foreign policy in the east and west of the earth, and in recovering more than one deadly, sinful, and criminal ‘recipe’ to address crises, problems, and conflicts. Here are the items that should not be forgotten from the Kissinger list:
Advising the Israeli occupying state to crush the first intifada, in a ‘brutal, comprehensive, and swift manner, These are Kissinger’s literal words, as deliberately leaked by Julius Berman, the former president of American Jewish organizations.
– The famous ‘anatomical’ position on the Iraqi occupation of Kuwait, in calling on Bush Sr. to carry out ‘surgical’ strikes that would affect the cultural, social, and economic depths of Iraq (the country and the people, before the regime and its military and political machine).
Publicly calling for ‘the extraction of Iraq’s teeth without destroying its ability to resist any foreign invasion that might appeal to its eager neighbors’ in a resounding article entitled ‘The Post-War Agenda’ published in early 1991.
– Reprimanding the team of former Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, because what they contracted with Palestinian President Yasser Arafat in Oslo and then in the White House is nothing but a dynamic Mechanism that will sooner or later lead to a Palestinian state (which he rejects wherever it comes and wherever it is established, It is equal for him that it is created from a pure ‘Waliyat’ or turns into less than a municipality).
The mockery of some ‘amateur boys’ in the White House, who confuse ‘business’ with morals, and trade with human rights (in the example of China); They do not discriminate in the trade wars between Euro-American sectarianism and the law of universal sharing of a vast market as much as it is narrow (the GATT pacts and its sisters)…
In an extensive article entitled ‘Lessons for an Exit Strategy’ dating back to the summer of 2005, Kissinger disclosed much of what had been hidden, although he was practically exposed from the start, about the existing or potential analogs between the US military involvement in Vietnam and the US occupation of Iraq, on the one hand, and the consequences of the military defeat there, and the consequences of the impossibility of the American director here, on the other hand. In addition, from that classic and correct lesson forever: that winning any war does not mean winning its peace, or perhaps achieving any peace!
The article contained that shocking paragraph: ‘It is certain that history does not repeat itself accurately. Vietnam was a Cold War battle; As for Iraq, it is an episode in the struggle against radical Islam. The challenge of the Cold War was understood to be the political survival of the nations – the independent states allied with the United States surrounding the Soviet Union. But the war in Iraq is not about the geopolitical issue as much as it is about the clash of ideologies, cultures, and religious beliefs. And because the Islamic challenge is far-reaching, the outcome in Iraq will have more profound significance than it was in Vietnam. What was striking in this conclusion was not limited to the reduction of the American military invasion (and then the British, for a useful reminder) to superficial and shallow stereotyping of radical Islam. Rather, on the inability of the history professor to absorb the lessons of history, which will not take long for them to unfold and take root and Kissinger will live long enough to see them with his own eyes, even as he puts the last lines in the manuscript of his 19th book.
No less surprising, of course, is that he concludes the chapter on Sadat in a poor metaphor, combining the Egyptian pharaoh Akhenaten’s desire to establish a monotheistic religion in contrast to the Egyptian Gods, with Sadat’s partnership with Golda Meir, Yitzhak Rabin and Menachem Begin; And how the current steps of normalization between the occupying state and each of the Emirates, Bahrain, Morocco, and Sudan are due to Sadat’s initiative, which nonetheless remains an ‘incomplete legacy’ and incomplete, according to Kissinger himself. More decreasing, and more exposing the methodologies of the book in general, that the peoples remain the largest absent, absent intentionally and deliberately, over the 528 pages of a volume that claims reading the leadership problem across two axes: the first, between the past and the future; The second, between the fixed values and the aspirations of those who lead. That is some of the reasons why we do not agree with Kissingerry’s opinion, if the percentage is so, about the fate of the leadership in Nixon America, where the ‘Watergate’ scandal transports the leader to the ranks of the eavesdropping eavesdropper; or in Thatcher’s Britain, where the leadership fist was not struck more forcefully than it did against unions and the public sector; As for Egypt, one has the right to elaborate and elaborate, and there is nothing wrong with it.
Whatever the opinion of the Six Strategies as Diagnosed by Kissinger, the use of strict filters to read the book remains an indispensable prior strategy, first or seventh… Same!
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