Thursday, January 19,2012 - during the Republican Presidential Primary
C-Span -Capital Hill Hearings
Exerpts:
"I want to offer friendship and trade with any one who will accept it. That would be the opposite of punishing the people of these countries, like in Iran, (where) we are putting punitive punishment and not allowing them to import or export... so I wouldn't do that, because it hurts the people, never hurts the governments. In fact, it enhances the power of the government, because there are alot of people in Iran right now who don't like the government. You offer friendship and trade. And you say, 'well some of these people are bad people.' Well, did we talk to the Soviets when they were killing hundreds of millions of people as well as China?. But eventually we got over this. We should talk to people. One example I've used frequently is the crises when I was drafted in 1962, with the missile crisis in Cuba. Kennedy and Khrushchev talked. We took missiles out of Turkey and (they) took missiles out of Cuba, and we didn't have to have that war. We need more diplomacy and more talking.."
"We go to a country and we say, look we want you to be our buddy and our dictator, like Mubarak, and give him $40 million and look what happened there. So if they do our bidding, we give them alot of money. If they don't do it, then we bomb them and occupy them. In Pakistan we have [had] 3 ways of doing it . We bomb them, kill innocent people. They get angry at us and angry at their government and we keep giving money to their government. No, the founders were right. The more trade and communication with people, the less likely we are to fight with them. When I was in high school we were fighting the Chinese, so I was delighted when Nixon decided to talk with them. Just think what was achieved in Vietnam. The French and the Americans probably killed over a million Vietnamese, we finally left, we lost 60.000 Americans, ... many more sick and injured .. finally we leave and guess what? There was no Communist domino effect. They became westernized. China became our banker, and we invest in Vietnam. All achieved through peaceful means and not war. This is why I think we should be talking to people.. "
"This doesn't mean you have to condone what they do. And if they are a threat and they have nuclear weapons, I don't want anyone to get anymore nuclear weapons. I don't want the Iranians to have nuclear weapons. But we contained the Soviets. They had 30,000 of them. So the last thing we need is a war in Iran over a weapon they don't have."
"Keynes and Hayek: The Clash That Defined Modern Economics" by Nicholas Wapshott :
"What Keynes found at the Peace talks in Paris (end of WWI) shocked him. ... He believed that to deliberately beggar a modern trading nation like Germany was to impose crippling poverty on its citizens, which would provide the conditions for extreme politics, insurrection, and revolution. Rather than bringing a just end to World War I, Keynes thought the Treaty of Versailles was planting the seeds of WW II. Back home, he penned The Economic Consequences of the Peace, a devastating indictment of the folly of the allied leaders. (xvii) ... Keynes's predictions that the burdensome reparations would lead to political instability and extremist politics would turn out to be chillingly prescient." (p.5 )
Henry Kissinger on "Charlie Rose" on Bloomberg channel, Febuary 6, 2012:
Kissinger: They believe, or some people when I was in Russia, argued that the situation in Syria is going to become chaotic. That all these various groups are going to become .. a kind of civil ware between factions. .. Well my perception, first of all, at this point, there is not alternative to the change of government in Syria.... Change in government is now inevitable. I have my own doubts that it's possible to negotiate an outcome agreeable to all sides. It should be attempted.... But if you ask me for my prediction for what is likely to happen, I think there is a great danger that Syria will be in turmoil for a substantial period of time.
Rose: "But is there anything that the United States or the west can do about that???
Kissinger: "Probably not... Not every problem of the world has a short-term solution. In the 19th century somebody said, 'once a play is started, it will be completed either by the actors or by the audience who mount the stage."
Rose: In Libya, was the west, France, Britain, the United States, right to do what they did, ... leading to the overthrow of a man like Qadafi ?
Kissinger: I had great doubts about the policies, for the following reasons. Qadafi. ... at this stage of his evolution had maintained tolerable relations with the west. I am worried about a situation in which there is no central government left in Lybia... In which the west will be put into the position of nation building in a society that hasn't been a nation. Again it's one of those things in which once the process had started it had to be brought to a conclusion. ... I am very uneasy a country in which militant groups occupying parts of each country, which is sort of the Somali condition, which could become a center of radicalism. ... Where we started, I could understand the concern to prevent a massacre in Bengazi. But we have to learn or understand that revolutions rarely end the way their organizers proclaim them. And once you start that process, it has its own momentum.
Rose: But can't you argue that stability and the status quo is not always in the best interest of the long term ??
Kissinger: Absolutely I agree with that. ... I don't think it was possible or perhaps even desirable to avoid the outbreak of the Arab Spring.
Kissinger: The 2nd phase of a revolution is to distill, out of this bundle of resentments, an organizing group that can restore enough authority so that you can conduct long-range policy. That then becomes a very difficult problem. And if it doesn't go well that isn't our fault. That doesn't mean we could have avoided it. But we ought to understand it. ...
<>
No comments:
Post a Comment