“We can't negotiate about the existence of Israel, but we can reduce its size to historical proportions,” Henry Kissinger, the 56th Secretary of State of the United States from 1973 to 1977, told his Iraqi counterpart in a high-level meeting three decades ago, according to a December 1975 memo presenting details of a conversation between Kissinger and Foreign Affairs Minister Saadoun Hammadi eight years after Iraq cut its ties with the U.S.
28,000 pages of Kissinger-era foreign policy papers published Friday showed that Washington tried to reach out to Arabs three decades ago, offering them help to make Israel a "small friendly country" of no threat to the Middle East and assuring Iraq that the U.S. would end its backing of Kurdish rebellion in the north.
Also according to the documents, released by George Washington University's National Security Archive, Kissinger, who served as national security adviser and secretary of state in the Nixon and Ford administrations, told Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai in 1972 that the United States could live with a communist government in South Vietnam if that evolved peacefully.
“If we can live with a communist government in China, we ought to be able to accept it in Indochina,'' the documents, obtained through the group's Freedom of Information requests, quoted Kissinger as saying.
Kissinger moreover hinted at the possibility that the United States would consider a nuclear response to stop the Soviets from attempting to overrun Asia with conventional forces.
Highlighting U.S. efforts at that time to win friends in the Arab world while it was aiding Israel militarily, the papers further quoted Kissinger as saying:
“We are on the other side of the fence,” Kissinger said at that time.
“What the United States is doing is not to create peace but to create a situation dominated by Israel.”
“Our attitude is not unsympathetic to Iraq. Don't believe; watch it.”
“Israel will be like Lebanon - struggling for existence, with no influence in the Arab world,” said Kissinger, who also stated that the U.S. public was more sympathetic with the Palestinians’ struggle for independence, claiming that Washington was reconsidering the huge amount of aid it gives the Jewish State.
But Hammadi was still skepticalabout KissingerÂ’s claims. He asked him whether the U.S. would recognize Palestinian identity and a Palestinian state.
“Is it in your power to create such a thing?” Hammadi asked.
But Kissinger replied with a little bit maneuver, telling him that he canÂ’t make recognition of Palestinian identity happen right away.
“No solution is possible without it,” Kissinger said.
“After a settlement, Israel will be a small friendly country,”
When Hammadi pressured Kissinger to grant Iraq support against the Kurds, Kissinger brushed his complaints off; saying, “One can do nothing about the past.”
Iraq revived its diplomatic ties with the U.S. right after the beginning of the Iran-Iraq war; when Hammadi became Prime Minister during SaddamÂ’s rule.
An architect of Vietnam war more than 30 years ago, Kissinger was quoted last year as saying that he has "a very uneasy feeling" that some of the same factors that damaged support for U.S. aggression in Vietnam are re-emerging in Iraq war.
"For me, the tragedy of Vietnam was the divisions that occurred in the United States that made it, in the end, impossible to achieve an outcome that was compatible with the sacrifices that had been made," former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, who supported the original decision to act against Iraq, was quoted as saying.
A few months ago, Kissinger appeared trying to justify a possible U.S. military strike againt Iran to force it suspend its nuclear program, which the U.S., backed by Israel, claims is being used as a guise for hidden developments to produce nuclear weapons.
He said that if Iran produced nuclear weapons, nonproliferation may cease to be a “meaningful policy, and then we live in a world of multiple nuclear centers. And then we’d have to ask ourselves what the world would look like if the [terrorist] bombs in London [on July 7] had been nuclear and 100,000 people had been killed.”
“It is a grave step to tolerate a world of multiple nuclear weapons centers without restraint. I’m not recommending military action, but I’m recommending not excluding it.”
