Barry M. Lando: Give Us a Break, Henry
[Barry M. Lando, a graduate of Harvard and Columbia University, spent 25 years as an award-winning investigative producer with “60 Minutes.” He has produced numerous articles, a documentary and a book, “Web of Deceit,” about Iraq. Lando is finishing a novel, “The Watchman’s File.”]
It’s always comforting to have Henry Kissinger around to advise the current U.S. administration on what to do. His latest advice to President Barack Obama regarding Egypt: Slow down, take things easier, don’t rush Egypt’s sensitive leaders.
“We should be looking at a democratic evolution,” said Kissinger. But he warned that the U.S. should cultivate key democratic reformists and military leaders in a low-key fashion during the process. “It should not look like an American project. The Egyptians are a proud people. They threw out the British and they threw out the Russians.”
On the other hand, when thin-skinned right-wing dictators in Argentina, Chile and Uruguay were kidnapping and murdering “democratic reformists” by the thousands in 1976, Kissinger, then secretary of state—not having to worry about lurid accounts of torture on Twitter and Facebook and Al-Jazeera—advised South American generals to get on with their grisly task so as not to provoke censure from a U.S. Congress beginning to waken to the ongoing slaughter. Or, as Kissinger put it to Argentine Foreign Minister Adm. Cesar Augusto Guzzetti in June 1976: “If there are things that have to be done, you should do them quickly. But you should get back quickly to normal procedures.”...
Read entire article at Truthdig
It’s always comforting to have Henry Kissinger around to advise the current U.S. administration on what to do. His latest advice to President Barack Obama regarding Egypt: Slow down, take things easier, don’t rush Egypt’s sensitive leaders.
“We should be looking at a democratic evolution,” said Kissinger. But he warned that the U.S. should cultivate key democratic reformists and military leaders in a low-key fashion during the process. “It should not look like an American project. The Egyptians are a proud people. They threw out the British and they threw out the Russians.”
On the other hand, when thin-skinned right-wing dictators in Argentina, Chile and Uruguay were kidnapping and murdering “democratic reformists” by the thousands in 1976, Kissinger, then secretary of state—not having to worry about lurid accounts of torture on Twitter and Facebook and Al-Jazeera—advised South American generals to get on with their grisly task so as not to provoke censure from a U.S. Congress beginning to waken to the ongoing slaughter. Or, as Kissinger put it to Argentine Foreign Minister Adm. Cesar Augusto Guzzetti in June 1976: “If there are things that have to be done, you should do them quickly. But you should get back quickly to normal procedures.”...