Kissinger held secret talks in Russia

[Turborama]

Source: Russia Today

American statesman Henry Kissinger made a secret visit to Moscow to persuade the Kremlin to join a US proposal to slash the number of nuclear warheads on both sides, reports The Daily Telegraph. The former US Secretary of State met with both President Medvedev and Prime Minister Putin on the vist, the UK newspaper says.

One of the world’s most controversial politicians, Henry Kissinger is again spearheading American foreign policy.

In December, Kissinger - now 85-years-old - secretly flew into the Russian capital at the request of then President-elect Barack Obama. Kissinger was there to sound out the Kremlin on a bilateral reduction of nuclear weapons, the paper says.

For two days he held talks with the Russian leadership. He put forward Obama’s desire to cut the number of warheads to 1,000 pieces on each side.

It is believed Obama chose Kissinger for the task to neutralize Republican opposition to the plan. Kissinger worked in the administrations of two Republican presidents - Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford.

Read more: http://www.russiatoday.com/features/news/36969

---

Source: Telegraph (UK)

Cold warrior Henry Kissinger woos Russia for Barack Obama


Henry Kissinger, the pioneer of Cold War detente during the Nixon era, has made a return to frontline politics after President Barack Obama reportedly sent him to Moscow to win backing from Vladimir Putin's government for a nuclear disarmament initiative.

By Adrian Blomfield, Moscow Correspondent

The Daily Telegraph has learned that the 85-year-old former US secretary of state met President Dmitry Medvedev for secret negotiations in December. According to Western diplomats, during two days of talks the octogenarian courted Russian officials to win their support for Mr Obama's initiative, which could see Russia and the United States each slashing their nuclear warheads to 1,000 warheads.

The decision to send Mr Kissinger to Moscow, taken by Mr Obama when he was still president-elect, is part of a plan to overcome probable Republican objections in Congress.

Mr Kissinger is believed to have won a verbal rather than written undertaking for the deal. Tom Graham, a senior associate at Kissinger Associates and a former member of the national security council in the White House, on Thursday confirmed that Mr Kissinger had met Mr Medvedev but denied that any negotiations had taken place and said he had not met with Mr Putin.

However, a diplomatic source said that Mr Kissinger held two days of talks with Mr Putin at his country house near Moscow.

While the details of the ambitious initiative are yet to be revealed, the proposal to return to the negotiating table after eight years of reluctance in Washington has been welcomed in Britain and elsewhere.

Read More: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/barackobama/4530042/Cold-warrior-Henry-Kissinger-woos-Russia-for-Barack-Obama.html


(edit to fix typo)

[KoKo]

1. Oh My....this would sound positive...but given what we know of Kissinger...

well...let's hope he's changed his cold warrior stance. I wouldn't trust him, though.

[MannyGoldstein]

2. He Can Only Negotiate, Not Agree

As disturbing as Kissinger is, I think this is a brilliant move.

[KoKo]

3. As long as there's not a "shiv" waiting

to go into Obama's back..

[McCamy Taylor]

4. Kissinger has a history of spoiling Dem negotiations to gain favor with Republicans.

He is a bad man to trust.

[harun]

12. If true this is not good. Obama cannot trust Kissinger.

[shanti]

5. ugh

why do the evil live so damn long??

[dgibby]

21. Because Satan doesn't like competition!

:evilgrin:

[ronnie624]

6. From the Telegraph:

"Despite widespread praise for the proposals, many European officials are privately urging the United States to be cautious, aware that Kremlin policy towards the West in recent years has been characterized by reversals. Apart from worries over Russia's increasingly belligerent international policies, there is also little doubt a disarmament deal would benefit Moscow more than Washington -- even if the Kremlin has threatened to stall talks on a new treaty in the past."

I suspect the Bush administrations belligerence has more to do with those reversals than anything, and not a word about his role in perpetrating the horrors in Indochina and Latin America.

Octogenarian? :eyes:

[Name removed]

7. Deleted sub-thread

Sub-thread removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

[peacetalksforall]

8. If everyone who has nuclear bombs limited their stock to 1000 - is that peace?

The problem is still in the little area of Israel, Iran, Pakistan, and now Saudi Arabia.

But Kissinger? The person I and others consider a traitor. A man who has made a fortune on war?

Too bad I don't get it. That is like calling in Mz Liar Rice because of her doctorate in things USSR.

I only have to hear Kissinger's name and I freeze up in fear of his evil.

He cannot even touch down at the airport in some countries? I guess he flew non-stop to Russia.

I'm not seeing what Obama sees and no one is going to share it with us if they know.

[Autumn]

9. Kissinger is nothing more

than a fucking maggot sandwich.:puke: :puke:

[Guy Whitey Corngood]

10. What did maggots ever do to you

to merit that insult? :evilgrin:

[Autumn]

11. I apologize to maggots every where

:rofl:

[Turborama]

13. Waaaaay off topic question...

...but what kind of music is your funky robot guy jiving to?

[Guy Whitey Corngood]

14. Right at this moment it's Skapulario (Puerto rican ska band). It all depends what he's

in the mood for.

[Karenina]

16. 7/8 of whatever origin

1212123... Bulgarian mebbe... ;-)

[keopeli]

15. in December? what happened to "one President at a time"??

[No Elephants]

17. Good question. Same thing that happened to one Party at a time, I guess.

[Peace Patriot]

18. Let me go way back here, to early Kissinger days, and tell you the first thing that

popped into my head, when I read this news bit: Ah, so THIS is why the CIA/WaPo did Nixon in--the open-door initiatives to Red China and Soviet Russia*!

After reading James Douglass' new book, "JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters" (great book--highly recommended; VERY relevant to today), and after all the shit that's gone down with the Bush Reich, I've been looking back, through these lenses, and wondering what our secret government had against Nixon, that it didn't protect him from Watergate.

This may be it--Nixon's dramatic openings to the biggest communist countries, China and Russia (engineered by Kissinger), which would be the natural prelim to disarmament. In the early part of the decade, JFK had tried to do it (disarmament, end of the Cold War) with backchannels to Krushchev and Castro. That is why the CIA assassinated him, on behalf of our war profiteers. (Douglass makes a very powerful, meticulously documented case for this.) Nixon was the secret government's boy, so long as he was slaughtering communists in Southeast Asia, but when he got a notion of improving his stature in the history books, and became the first U.S. president ever to visit China and Russia, they had to get rid of him, too.

And here we are again--same issue, potential armageddon still with us, proxy wars starting again--and a new president gets the idea that maybe we could NOT have an arms race (?!), maybe we could use the money elsewhere. And who pops up? Kissinger!

Now, I have NO ILLUSIONS about Henry Kissinger, believe me. I'm just trying to think like an emperor...uh, president...would have to think, and how our war profiteers think, etc., and how the past informs the present. IF, as Douglass avers, the CIA killed Kennedy for this reason (his attempt to end the Cold War--and Douglass is very convincing), then this same secret government had the power to protect Nixon from a silly little 'ol thing like the Watergate break-in, and they didn't. And guess who wouldn't let go of the matter, and turned it into a big deal--that war profiteering CIA tool, the Washington Post! (Upshot: WaPo hasn't "changed"--it hasn't deteriorated from a great investigative newspaper into a shill for Bushwhack war; it has always been a war profiteer shit rag; just did a better job of covering that up, back then.)

In fact, they not only didn't protect Nixon, they very likely set him up. The Watergate Hearings, that gripped the nation--all stoked by the Washington Post--were shuckin jive. Bread and circuses.

Whaddya think?

--------------

*(I remember Nixon's unprecedented trip to Soviet Russia well, because I led a group of students on a visit to Russia immediately afterward. We were among the first U.S. tourists to visit Russia in the post-WWII era, as the result of Nixon's "thaw." We had some funny experiences talking to Russian students who LOVED Nixon, and were all interested in how many cars American workers could afford, and seemed very angry about their own deprivations and stulted economy, while we--who despised Nixon because of the continued slaughter in Southeast Asia--saw nothing good in Nixon at all. The Russians were shocked. How could we speak of our wonderful president that way--the man who broke the "Cold War" ice and himself came on a friendly visit to Soviet Russia?!)

[Aloha Spirit]

22. I think Kissinger is a little senile and wouldn't be able to pull off

anything too clever at this point.
Beyond that, I don't have much of a taste for reading about the double-crossings in 20th c. US politics, but Nixon does seem to have been screwed over, and your explanation sounds plausible to me.
Kissinger has very strong feelings about keeping the world safe from nuclear dangers, and this being common ground with Prez. Obama, the selection and timing don't seem suspicious to me.

[Thothmes]

23. Lyndon Baines Johnson slaughtered a lot

more communists in Southeast Asia than Nixon. He also slaughtered a whole hell of a lot more Americans for that fact.

[Peace Patriot]

24. I'm not exonerating LBJ, but he was only president during 1964-1968. Nixon

presided over the second half of the war, through 1973--longer than Johnson--and initiated the big escalations into Cambodia and Laos. I don't have figures handy, but I would guess they were about equal as to slaughtering Southeast Asians and U.S. soldiers. In any case, it's irrelevant to my point: "Nixon was the secret government's boy, so long as he was slaughtering communists in Southeast Asia, but when he got a notion of improving his stature in the history books, and became the first U.S. president ever to visit China and Russia, they had to get rid of him, too."

What does Johnson's body count vs. Nixon's body count have to do with Nixon's responsibility for slaughtering Southeast Asians? Even if it's less--and I don't think it is--he still slaughtered tens of thousands of people. He also lied to American voters that he had a "secret plan" to end the war--just as LBJ had lied about being the "peace candidate" in 1964--then the war went on for five more years under Nixon and two under Ford, with significant escalations under Nixon. Both LBJ and Nixon are war criminals. So is Kissinger. But I was trying to get at a more hidden and subtle war profiteer issue--the lucrativeness of the "Cold War" in general, with both sides maintaining and increasing enormous military machines, including nuclear arsenals, and armies, navies and air forces. Our war profiteers were angling for this to continue indefinitely, including (but not limited to) a full scale war in Vietnam. That's why they killed JFK (and his brother) (--who had drawn up plans to withdraw from Vietnam, and were working backchannels to Krushchev and Castro to end the Cold War altogether). Nixon's "thaw" with China and Russia held out the possibility of a quicker end to the Cold War--and to the ever escalating cost of it. I have for some time wondered what the motive of the war profiteers in getting rid of Nixon might have been (if that's what happened--a decision not to protect him as to Watergate). And then this newsbit about Kissinger brought it into focus. Nixon was angling for de-escalation of the Cold War and disarmament, but the war profiteers had decades more of huge war profiteering in mind, through at least the Reagan regime. Exit Nixon.

[Baby Snooks]

25. His secret plan...

Nixon was probably planning to give South Vietnam to the People's Republic of China. For the oil of course. And who was his "diplomat" in Beijing? Why George HW Bush of course. China didn't get South Vietnam. But then we didn't get the oil either. Vietnam was about oil.

The problem was it turned out the reserves were in Chinese waters. And not as large as everyone thought. Where there's oil, there's Bush and Halliburton. Where there's war, there's Kissinger. It does not bode well. More than likely the real negotiation will be for the oil and gas for the pipeline that probably will still be built in Afghanistan. The one that Enron was going to build. Which may or may not explain Enron. Which is still in business for those who don't know that.

The American people for the most part are truly stupid. No one ever questioned how we could be fighting communists in South Vietnam while we were negotiating with communists in the People's Republic of China.

[bemildred]

19. Well damn, there goes the "secret" part. nt

[Joanne98]

20. God