General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: This message was self-deleted by its author [View all]MADem
(135,425 posts)You can't play the "oh well" and "factor in mitigation" game with JFK or LBJ. Or any of them....and you can't take their decisions out of the environment in which they were made. I don't excuse Kermit Roosevelt's shenanigans in Iran, but they were carried out in the context of a nuclear arms race and a cold war where control of oil was key to hegemony. Who's gonna be top dog? There can be only ONE. If you think Mossadeq was "independent" let me swiftly disabuse you--he would have been a puppet of the USSR inside of weeks had he stayed in power. Those "Russkies" were right over the Caspian. People seem to forget how close Iran and the former Soviet empire was--Iran was their back yard.
It was a "which devil do you prefer" exercise.
All leaders who employed Henry had a choice to disavow or disregard Kissinger's advice. Kissinger did not have powers of decree--he acted under instruction of leaders who had power, and who made those decisions. He came up with ideas, and he carried out the wishes of his superiors. His bosses had the right of refusal. Like Truman said, The Buck Stops Here.
HRC appeared with Kissinger at public events, to include an awards ceremony where she was the recipient and he was the presenter. She has said--clearly--that she disagrees with him without being disagreeable. She doesn't buy off on what he did or how he did it, but she can still be friendly with him, because, as most people know, SECSTATES, POTUSes, and other cabinet officials never really retire--they get briefs, and they provide input to government as they ramble around the world doing their private life thing. They sometimes take on "unofficial" assignments and carry water in cases where plausible deniability can be useful. It's a "patriotic thing."
For this reason, we see people in these small clubs (the POTUS/FLOTUS clubs, the SECSTATES Club, the CABINET Club, etc.) being chummy with one another in the odd pictures. People here on DU try to make something of that as though it means more than simple civility and comity in the service of larger national goals--it's as dumb-ass as saying that Warren is in agreement with all of Reagan's policies because she voted for him twice and his VP as POTUS once, or that she's more GOP than Democratic because she was a Republican for longer than she's been a Democrat.
I can't bear this childish "S/He's DEAD to me" games I see played here at DU. It really is school-yard-ish, and it's not how the real world works.