What, Henry Kissinger is a Republican?

Summarized Hitch:

I’m shocked, schocked that the people who planned my beloved war would have anything to do with Henry Kissinger. Why, I thought that they shared all of my views on foreign policy, and that the necons were somehow hermetically sealed off from Kissinger’s influence. Also, in spite of the fact that Kissinger has been explicitly arguing against a withdrawal from Iraq, it will clearly be his fault if we withdraw and something bad happens.

Read the whole thing. Hitch’s position is based on a couple faulty premises that, to their credit, many other liberal hawks have come to grips with. The first and most important is that the war that they wanted was not the war that they were going to get, and that this was obvious from day one. No matter how powerful in the abstract the case to liberate Iraq might have been, the actual execution of its liberation would inevitably fall into the hands of men and women who were both incompetent and utterly uninterested in the goals that the Euston Manifestors pursued.

The second and related point is that, despite Hitchens’ fantasies, the foreign policy wing of the Republican Party has never been neatly divided between realists and neocons. There have been disputes within the foreign policy community, but the core of the establishment has remained the same since Nixon’s second term. Rumsfeld, Cheney, Wolfowitz, Scowcroft, and others have been around for a long time. The direction is dependent on the man at the top; under the experience George H.W. Bush, a competent and reasonably moderate foreign policy was possible, while under his son it has not. It’s absurd to declare Henry Kissinger a war criminal then to explicitly support the foreign policy efforts of a Republican administration; only an idiot or an ideologue could convince himself that Kissinger would have no influence.