Just watched The Trials of Henry Kissinger (2002) last night. I have not read the similarly titled book by Christopher Hitchens, whose smug visage appears a zillion times throughout the film to detail Kissinger’s alleged war crimes in Cambodia, Chile, and East Timor, but the film is entertaining and fairly compelling. The film is problematic, however, in that it seems to endorse international war crimes roundups without any thought to their consequences (such as the devastation of Serbia). I also wonder what the film’s makers think of Hitchens’s latest turn as warmonger extraordinaire, given that their site includes a prominent link to Antiwar.com on its front page. I recently heard Hitchens remark that anyone who opposes the Bush wars is in fact supporting “Islamofascism” (which I assume means in turn that anyone who opposed the bombing of Cambodia, the Allende coup, and Suharto’s attack on East Timor was supporting the spread of Stalinism). Note also Kissinger’s less than ecstatic take on the invasion of Iraq.
I’d be interested to hear readers’ thoughts on the film or the book, as well as filmmaker Eugene Jarecki’s thoughts on Hitchens.
(The title of this post comes from Joseph Stromberg’s must-read history of the “realists” who came before today’s neoconservatives.)