Doctor Kissinger Returns

The Bush administration announced yesterday the appointment of Henry Kissinger to lead a committee tasked to investigate the causes of the 9/11 terrorist attacks [NYT coverage here].

The selection of Kissinger is particularly interesting for a couple of reasons. For one thing, the creation of an independent committee with the mission of finding out why our enemies are trying to kill us has the potential to be nothing more than a silly farce (imagine a committee formed to investigate the causes of the Pearl Harbor attack). In fact the Bush administration had resisted the idea until recently. Next to Ronald Reagan, Kissinger was perhaps the most towering figure in American foreign policy during the Cold War, and as such he has and continues to provoke strong reaction: generally either reverence or vilification. But whether you love or hate Kissinger, no one doubts his status or the importance he attaches to it. It seems unlikely in the extreme that Kissinger would be willing to sacrifice his credibility by residing over a committee that will simply rubber stamp politically expedient whitewash.

The other thing about Kissinger that makes his selection to head this committee interesting is his intellectual approach to foreign affairs. Kissinger is an unabashed realist. Like most realists, he shares the assumption that nations can be counted on to act on behalf of what they perceive to be their national interest, with moral or idealogical concerns playing a negligable role in their calculations. This morally leveling perspective tends to lead to a structural or systemic approach to the analysis of foreign affairs. If the character of a nation -- its ideological or moral compass -- is irrelevant to its conduct in foreign affairs, then the chief determinants of foreign policy will be external to a country: the alignment and capabilities of allies and competitors within its sphere of influence.

In the case of some academic realists, particularly the so-called neo-realist school, this structural emphasis is carried to absurd conclusions -- states are reduced to rational actors in a system that can be analyzed like a lab experiment. Some of the papers published by neo-realists in the academic journals come complete with mathematical doodles and various assorted schematic diagrams. Kissinger is too sophisticated for this. His analyses are structural but highly nuanced. The relevance of this to his selection to head the 9/11 invesigation committee is that Kissinger is likely to look for "root causes" in the dynamics between the Arab/Muslim nations and the rest of the world. There is a lot of meat on that bone. Nations may be counted on to act in their own best interests, but in tyrannical states where there are no citizens (as we understand the term), the nation effectively is the tyrant. In other words, the "root causes" of terrorism for someone of Kissinger's intellectual persuasion (and depth) will not be found in the poverty of the Arab world, but in the Arab world's relation to the rest of the world, and how those dynamics cause a divergence of interests between the heads of Arab states and the people of those countries, and how that divergence creates a need for propaganda that feeds hatred of the West (the U.S. and Israel in particular) and thus terrorism.

With Kissinger heading this committee the results may be something our Saudi "friends" would find very embarrassing. As things currently stand that is not something the Bush administration would obviously want, but Kissinger will have his own agenda and the clout to carry it out. It may be the case that Kissinger is as close to the Saudis as anyone in the administration, but HAK is 79 years old and heading this committee could well be his last act of public service. He is a man to whom reputation and prestige is everything, so he has everything to lose by not doing this right.