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Comment by JumpCrisscross | Hacker News Reader

> one of the few publications with the integrity to publish those words

And a symptom of the term being neutered into meaninglessness.

A critical element of war criminality is command. If you don’t command armed forces, it’s difficult to commit war crimes, legally speaking. You can have condoned or collaborated or contributed to them.

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> In February 1969, weeks after taking office, and lasting through April 1970, U.S. warplanes secretly dropped 110,000 tons of bombs on Cambodia. By summer 1969, according to a colonel on the Joint Staff, Kissinger – who had no constitutional role in the military chain of command – was personally selecting bombing targets. “Not only was Henry carefully screening the raids, he was reading the raw intelligence,” Col. Ray B. Sitton told Hersh for The Price of Power. A second phase of bombing continued until August 1973, five months after the final U.S. combat troops withdrew from Vietnam. By then, U.S. bombs had killed an estimated 100,000 people out of a population of only 700,000. The final phase of the bombing, which occurred after the Paris Peace Accords mandated U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam, was its most intense, an act of cruel vengeance from a thwarted superpower.

People defending him simply don't know what he did.

The level at which Henry Kissinger micromanaged the bombing of innocent civilians can not be overlooked. Even by fairly stringent definitions he is a war criminal.

> level at which Henry Kissinger micromanaged the bombing of innocent civilians can not be overlooked

Sure. But legally irrelevant. He didn’t command them. The person receiving the order could—and in many cases, should—have refused. That’s different if e.g. Nixon ordered it directly, because in that case it’s a military command.

Again, these terms had meaning. But they’re practically unenforceable even in public opinion, now, because they’re bandied about loosely. That gives cover for actual war criminals.

If your argument starts with "Sure, he micromanaged the bombing of innocent civilians but", then I think you've gotten lost in the technicalities of being right on the Internet.

> then I think you've gotten lost in the technicalities of being right on the Internet

Legality is entirely technical. When we lose sight of that, and turn legal terms like war criminal into colloquial ones, we sap the terminology of strength. If everyone horrific is a war criminal, then it’s all just banal evil. Nuremberg attempted to draw a line. This type of rhetoric loses its clarity.

No one said that everyone horrific is a war criminal, this is a straw man argument. The claim is that someone who personally "approved each of the 3,875 Cambodia bombing raids" that killed 150,000 civilians can reasonably be called a war criminal. If you think that's diluting the term then I really don't know what to say.

That's the point. He was giving direct targeting data to bomber pilots that bypassed the chain of command. You can't say someone can't be a war criminal if they had underlings, supervisors, or peers who should have known better and stopped them. There would never be war criminals in that case.

> can't say someone can't be a war criminal if they had underlings, supervisors, or peers who should have known better and stopped them

This isn’t true. The persons who carry out the order are liable. As is the commander.

> The person receiving the order could—and in many cases, should—have refused.

To execute it. Kissinger didn’t execute. He relayed. It’s a subtle, frustrating but—I think—necessary distinction to preserve the sanctity of the term required to prosecute heads of state, a novel concept in its own right.

This is like arguing Eichmann had no part in the holocaust because he just organized the trains. I imagine the Cambodians would make the same distinction the Israelis did, in that both men were clearly evil people.

> Eichmann had no part in the holocaust because he just organized the trains

Eichman was an SS officer! In what way did he lack command authority?

Kissinger was picking out targets in Cambodia. In what way was he not deeply involved?

Nobody asked if he was “deeply involved.” Nobody is even contesting that he acted illegally. Solely that he was a war criminal, which has a specific legal meaning.

War criminal is the new RICO. Except the latter doesn’t lose legitimacy when the public mis-uses it.

I think I hate this website.

> I hate this

This is a natural response to divergent opinions [1]. It’s the mechanism through which social media polarises populations [2][3].

Our brains simply didn’t evolve to deal with multiple hypotheses and different opinions, and most of us never get the training to do so calmly and effectively.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_sorting

[2] https://pnas.scienceconnect.io/api/oauth/authorize?ui_locale...

[3] https://academic.oup.com/poq/article/80/S1/351/2223236?login...

Yeah I watched that kurzgesagt video yesterday too. You're still a ghoul if you defend a man who was personally involved in bombing 150,000 civilians.

> still a ghoul if you defend a man who was personally involved in bombing 150,000 civilians

If you can't see the difference between defending a person and defending the meaning of a statute, sure. It makes life simpler when we turn up the contrast to absolutes.

The effort of these apologists makes my stomach sick

Yes, I’m sure that’s why he was never seriously threatened legally: the closest you could get to command would probably be Cambodia where he very explicitly told General Haig to start bombing a neutral country but in that case was also very clearly passing on Nixon’s direct order: “He wants a massive bombing campaign in Cambodia. He doesn’t want to hear anything. It’s an order, it’s to be done. Anything that flies, on anything that moves. You got that?”

I’m sure that if he’d ever had to face a hostile inquiry his defense would have been that when the President of the United States tells you to make a phone call, you do, and he’d almost certainly have been successful.

"I just did what the Führer ordered" wasn't a winning argument at Nuremberg.

Yes, but we haven’t exactly set the same precedent for our own war criminals. I had hoped that Obama would’ve had more courage but a lot of people convinced him to make the wrong call.

> wasn't a winning argument at Nuremberg

For subordinates who executed the illegal actions. Within the command structure. Being in the command structure was important.

We did this for practical reasons. In Iraq, we fired the Ba’athist civilian state along with its military. So not only was the successor left without its bureaucracy, said bureaucracy was also unemployed. Ripe for the taking.

Legally, focussing on the originator and executor of an order is cleaner. It’s stark in a way involving every interlocutor isn’t.

> For subordinates who executed the illegal actions. Within the command structure. Being in the command structure was important.

For a fairly comparable role (foreign minister), Joachim von Ribbentrop was convicted (among other things, for "crimes against peace" and "deliberately planning a war of aggression") and executed at Nuremberg. Plenty of ministers in the list there.

It's hard to argue Kissinger wasn't involved in "deliberately planning a war of aggression" against Cambodia.

This is fair. Were America to find itself at the mercy of a foreign power, he would likely have been prosecuted. That said—and I’m not a Hague expert, so please take this with the grain of salt an internet discussion should carry—the intent of Nuremberg was a balance of practicality and precision, on one hand, with deterrence and retribution, on the other hand.

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