There is little doubt that Dr Kissinger possesses opinions, but is he prepared to use them?
FRANK JOHNSON Dr Kissinger recently wrote an article on what should be done about Saddam. The liberal New York Times's front page reported that Dr Kissinger's article had come out against President's Bush's attacking Iraq. The conservative Wall Street Journal, and other supporters of Mr Bush's attacking Iraq, retorted that, on the contrary, the article had favoured such an attack. They added that the New York Times had been guilty of a characteristic liberal distortion of the news.
Opponents of attacking retorted that the article had indeed opposed going to war. One of them, the commentator on American politics, Mr John B. Judis, has written in the magazine American Prospect, arguing that Dr Kissinger's article was undoubtedly against an attack on Iraq.
The incident emphasises again the West's difficulty in knowing what to do about Dr Kissinger. There is little doubt that he possesses opinions. The question, as it has always been, is whether he is prepared to use them. True, he seems to have some sort of delivery system. Certainly, he was able to hit the front page of the New York Times with an opinion. The issue: what was it? Pro-war or anti-war? This will not be known for sure until he opens his article to unrestricted UN inspectors. Even then, we may not to be sure. Inspectors who favour war will say that the article favours it, and vice versa.
Many of us do not mind admitting that we do not know how to deal with this troublesome figure. It is all very well to say that his opinions pose no direct threat to the United States. The fact remains that they can reach Europe. There, they could cause untold damage. But that depends on whether he makes clear what his opinions are. Some analysts say we are still a long way from that. Others say that, any minute now, he will say what one of his opinions is. As so often in these matters, the experts disagree. In those circumstances, what is Mr Bush supposed to do? He can hardly attack Iraq without knowing what Dr Kissinger's opinion is. But how can he find it out?
It cannot be ruled out that, quite soon, in the late autumn, after the midterm elections or in the early winter, Dr Kissinger will write another article. He might say something like: 'There is no doubt that societal and regime mutation in Iraq should be an imperative whether or not subject to the approval of a world community which almost certainly shares the United States's geopolitical paradigms without endorsing some notional clash of civilisations as rejected by Fukuyama or indeed Taiwan.'
American right-wingers will exclaim: 'What could be clearer than that? Henry K is for zapping Saddam, and how! We always knew he was one of us.' But the next day's New York Times front-page headline will announce: 'Kissinger, nuancing position, urges Bush—Saddam alliance.' The next day's Wall Street Journal editorial would comment that the New York Times's reporting would have been rejected as implausible by Goebbels.
My own view is that Dr Kissinger does indeed possess opinions of mass construction. Any mass can put a construction on them. But the public will not be convinced until President Bush and Mr Blair produce their long-promised dossier that Dr Kissinger's opinions really do exist.
When I disputed here, two weeks ago, that we could or should have gone to war against Hitler any earlier than we did, I did not mention Donald Rumsfeld. He had not yet himself expressed the great orthodoxy, invariably deployed whenever in our day a war is urged against a tyranny. But, hardly had my observations appeared, he did. I feel justified in returning to the subject. Apart from anything else, there was not the space last time to make an additional point about the 1938 Munich agreement.
Mr Rumsfeld presumably thinks that instead of arriving at that agreement we should have gone to war, if we had not done so even earlier. My additional point about Munich is to do with something which would have made it even more difficult for us to have gone to war in 1938, even if we had wanted to. It is that it is now possible plausibly to argue that the Czechs themselves did not want us to.
Hitler, it will be remembered, demanded that the Sudetenland of Czechoslovakia be ceded to the Reich because it had a German-speaking majority. At Munich, Britain and France gave it to him. Much of the world has since assumed that the Czech government was against it. Today's relevant scholarship suggests otherwise (for example. the 1992 collection Reappraising the Munich Pact: Contemporary' Perspectives, edited by Maya Latynski).
We now know that in July 1938 the French foreign minister, Bonnet, told the Czech president, Benes, that France and Britain would not go to war over the Sudetenland, and Benes privately agreed that they should not. Before the Munich agreement, Benes was already suggesting areas that should be ceded to Germany.
It is fair to speculate that the reason was that by 1938 Benes and other Czech notables had concluded that their state, which the Allies had approved at Versailles after the first world war, was unstable. This was because it contained too many disaffected races, In our own day, a later president, Havel, concluded the same. The Czechs separated from the Slovaks.
It is possible that, had we 'stood up to' Hitler in 1938, we would have been threatening war on behalf of a people whose government did not want our war on their behalf. Such a war could not have happened in those circumstances.
In his autobiography, A.J.P. Taylor tells of a visit to Prague which he made after the war, in 1946. Benes was back as president from English exile; briefly, since he left again when the communists took over. Benes took Taylor to a window overlooking Prague in the Hradcany Palace. 'Is it not beautiful?' he asked. The only undamaged city in central Europe, and all my doing'. by which he meant, said Taylor, 'his acceptance of the Munich settlement in 1938'. Benes had tended not to be so candid, or such an 'appeaser', in public.
Just under a year after Munich, 63 years ago this week, Hitler invaded Poland. There was no Munich for the Poles. In the preface to the second edition of his Origins of the Second World War. Taylor pointed out that six and a half million Poles died in the war, and about 100,000 Czechs. He asked what it was better to be: a betrayed Czech or a saved Pole?
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