Venerated Republican war criminal Henry Kissinger was here in Philadelphia yesterday, where he appeared in front of the World Affairs Council. He was peddling the same old line of amoral horse manure:

Former Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger issued a strong warning yesterday against a precipitous withdrawal of U. S. troops from Iraq, suggesting it would be a failure comparable to Vietnam.

“We failed [in Vietnam] because in the end, America defeated itself and abandoned its military and political objectives,” Kissinger said at a daylong conference in Philadelphia.

Whatever one’s view of the decision to enter Iraq or how the military campaign has been handled, Kissinger continued, a withdrawal of U.S. troops now would strengthen the voice of Muslim extremists worldwide.

“If when we go we leave nothing behind but a failed state and chaos, the consequences will be disastrous - for the region, for America’s position in the world and for peace in the world,” Kissinger said.

He specifically warned that neighboring countries, including Iran and Turkey, would seek to extend their influence into Iraq “to fill the vacuum” of departing U.S. troops.

Huh. And here, the Turks are already threatening to send troops into Iraq - while we’re still there.

Guess that blows that little rationale to hell. Wonder when they’re going to invite me to speak at the World Affairs Council?

As to America betraying our military and political objectives in Iraq - gee, I don’t seem to know what they are. Do you, Henry? Please, share with the rest of the class!

But let’s move on to the real issue: Kissinger’s alleged credibility. He is, after all, the man who egged on Richard Nixon to break the law and spy on Daniel Ellsburg:

John Dean: What happened is Nixon, as Dan alluded to, didn’t have a particularly negative reaction when he first read the release of the Pentagon Papers in the Sunday Times, after his — looking actually for the story on his daughter’s wedding that weekend. That was the coverage he was interested in. He saw this other story and read it, and then he thought this was harder on the Democrats than it was on Republicans, so he didn’t have a problem.

Amy Goodman: Because it was on the history of the involvement in Vietnam.

John Dean: Yes. And it wasn’t really until Monday, when Henry got a hold of him and came in, and Henry knew exactly which button to push to get Nixon’s manhood involved and by telling the President, “Mr. President, if you don’t deal with Dan Ellsberg and this problem, the world is going to think you’re a weakling.” And once Nixon’s manhood is involved, that’s why we got him pounding on the desk, “I wanna break-in at the Brookings! I want this!” It was really very threatening to Nixon personally that Kissinger would think him less than the man he should be in this office, filling these shoes that have so much history in them.

Daniel Ellsburg: But if I may say, the Plumbers were really set up a little bit later after that to neutralize me. That was the word used.

AG: And the Plumbers, of course, to deal with leaks. That’s why they were called the Plumbers.

DE: Well, to deal with leaks, but as I say, in the tapes here that I present in the book and that I’ve listened to a lot, his attitude toward leaks was, “I want him tried in the press. Do you understand? Leak it out. Leak it out. Everything you have on him.” And that’s what they were trying to get on me. But the reason was, as I said, that they were worried about current documents. His attitude toward the Democrats was “This is great. Let’s get out more.” But on him, he didn’t want leaks.

That brings us up to the present right now. If I can really sum up a lot of what we’ve been saying, listening to John also, and my situation, what does a patriotic official who’s taken an oath to uphold the Constitution, which is what we all did, including the President, not to uphold a Fuhrer or a Commander-in-Chief, but to uphold the Constitution, what should she or he do when he discovers that the administration, under the direction of the President, is violating the Constitution or greatly endangering the public, the country, the security, as is happening right now with our plans to attack Iran? And we listen to the — with the Iranians promising that they will retaliate against Americans in Iraq and here. They can lie. They can bluff. I believe that threat. I think that these plans are endangering us. Okay, what do you do then if you know that the public is being lied to about very dangerous plans?

Am I the only one who finds it odd that Kissinger’s retrospective on Vietnam includes the notion that the only problem with what we did there is that we should have done the same things, only harder, faster, stronger?

The people of Indochina, King mused in 1967, “must find Americans to be strange ‘liberators’ as we destroy their families, villages, land*[and] kill a million acres of their crops” and “send them into the hospitals, with at least twenty casualties from American firepower for one ‘Vietcong’-inflicted injury’” (King, “A Time to Break the Silence” [1967], pp. 234-239 in King, The Essential Writings and Speeches of Martin Luther King, Jr., ed. by James W. Washington [New York, NY: HarperCollins, 1986]).

Henry Kissinger is the living embodiment of America’s collective amnesia. Instead of being run out of town on a rail, he’s feted and treated as a tribal elder. I suppose if your tribe is that of multinational jackals, it might be appropriate.

It took a lot to create that haunted and broken look in the eyes of the peasants who had fled the Plain of Jars in northern Laos. I interviewed hundreds of these refugees from the illegal Nixon-Kissinger air war while working as a journalist and interpreter for TV reporters like Ted Koppel and Bernard Kalb between September 1969 and February 1971. I dispatched tapes of these interviews and photos to congressional committees in Washington and later appeared before a hearing chaired by Sen. Ted Kennedy. But while my efforts helped generate a flurry of attention for the victims of the illegal Laos air war — the most brutal and sustained bombing campaign against a civilian population in history — no one from the Nixon administration was ever brought to justice as a result.

They had names, these people: Thao, Bounphet, Khamphong, Loung. They had treasured wives and husbands, children and grandparents, buffaloes and homes, rice fields and temples. And they had dreams — and as much right to these dreams as did any of the U.S. leaders who obliterated them.

It was a wrenching experience to hear these kind, decent human beings describe the extermination of revered grandmothers, burned alive by napalm before their eyes, to hear them weep as they remembered seeing a beloved 3-year-old daughter torn apart by anti-personnel bombs. Many of the children who survived carried the marks of the U.S. air war, burned flesh, missing limbs.

These people had voices, too, although they were rarely heard back in the United States. I collected their stories in a book called “Voices From the Plain of Jars.” In it, one 33-year-old woman recalled, “We lived in holes to protect our lives. There were bombs of many kinds. I saw my cousin die in the field of death. My heart was most disturbed and my voice called out loudly. (The airplanes came) until there were no houses at all. And the cows and buffalo were finished. Until everything was leveled and you could see only the red, red ground.”

The Nixon-Kissinger holocaust from above continued to afflict the peasant populations of Southeast Asia until the end of the war. Although these two remorseless executioners were finally forced by the growing antiwar fervor at home to withdraw U.S. ground troops, they vastly expanded their bombing operations across Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia. Their goal was not, as they claimed, to protect the American troop withdrawal. The North Vietnamese would have happily escorted U.S. troops out of the country. Rather, Nixon and Kissinger used the bombing to prop up local regimes and avoid being seen as responsible for “losing” Indochina.

Imagine. Henry Kissinger was only a few short blocks away, in my city, and people didn’t get up and leave the room.

I’m ashamed for Philadelphia.