One Man's War Criminal . . .: A mad leftist project, revealed.(article by Christopher Hitchens "indicts" Henry Kissinger as war criminal)

Last weekend in New York, it was all but impossible to buy the latest issue of Harper's. The magazine contained the first half of Christopher Hitchens's vast "indictment" of Henry Kissinger as a war criminal, for carrying out a foreign policy of which Hitchens disapproves; and it had sold out in the first 15 or so places I checked. A second installment is forthcoming in the March issue, but having read the first, I predict that the next issue will not sell out. Hitchens writes gracefully, as always, but his organization of the complicated material is rambling, tortuous, and confused.

Not without reason, however-for clarity would be fatal to his argument. Insofar as his thesis can be briefly summed up, it is that Kissinger can and should be prosecuted for carrying out policies that are now recognized under the "Pinochet precedent" as war crimes or crimes against humanity. His indictment has several weaknesses: In some cases, the actions denounced by Hitchens are not war crimes; in others, Kissinger did not commit them; in still others, both.

A wonderful example of this last was pointed out by columnist George Jonas in Canada's National Post. Jonas noted that Hitchens cited Kissinger's mere contemplation of bombing North Vietnamese dikes as evidence of a "regnant mentality" disposed seriously to consider committing war crimes. But destroying dikes to weaken North Vietnam's economy would have been not a war crime, but an attack on a legitimate military target. The British destroyed German dams in World War II, and the NATO bombing of Serbia in the Kosovo war also targeted its economic infrastructure. If Hitchens believes such acts to be war crimes, why is he targeting Kissinger (who, after all, rejected them) rather than Tony Blair and Bill Clinton, who carried them out? The idea is absurd. Hitchens can nonetheless content himself with having invented a new international felony: a "war-thought-crime."

When it comes to actions that Kissinger actually took-or, more precisely, for which he bore a partial responsibility as a member of the Nixon administration-the indictment becomes nothing more than restaging of leftist anti-Vietnam nostalgia. Kissinger is accused, for instance, of "treating two whole countries-Laos and Cambodia-as if they were disposable hamlets." This accusation should, instead, be leveled at the North Vietnamese, who took over entire portions of Cambodia and used them as bases to supply their forces and attack U.S. and South Vietnamese troops. Objecting to this intrusion on their neutrality, the Cambodians invited the U.S. to evict the North Vietnamese. What subsequently happened to the Cambodian people was a tragedy-but it was one begun by the North Vietnamese and completed by their sometime allies, the Khmer Rouge, who were in fact guilty of monumental crimes against humanity.

Hitchens sees the entire American prosecution of the Vietnam War after October 1968 as, in itself, a gigantic war crime-and all who died between October 1968 and April 1975 as victims crying out to The Hague for vengeance. Or, as he writes: "Kissinger had to know that every casualty in Indochina after 1968 was avoidable."

Even if that were so, it would not justify placing on Kissinger the entire blame for decisions taken by a democratically elected government. But it is not so. Hitchens's whole indictment on the Vietnam issue rests on the delusion that the North Vietnamese were willing to reach a genuine compromise at the Paris peace talks in October 1968. Given that assumption, he ...