Comment by acdha
2 years ago
Yes, I’m sure that’s why he was never seriously threatened legally: the closest you could get to command would probably be Cambodia where he very explicitly told General Haig to start bombing a neutral country but in that case was also very clearly passing on Nixon’s direct order: “He wants a massive bombing campaign in Cambodia. He doesn’t want to hear anything. It’s an order, it’s to be done. Anything that flies, on anything that moves. You got that?”
I’m sure that if he’d ever had to face a hostile inquiry his defense would have been that when the President of the United States tells you to make a phone call, you do, and he’d almost certainly have been successful.
"I just did what the Führer ordered" wasn't a winning argument at Nuremberg.
Yes, but we haven’t exactly set the same precedent for our own war criminals. I had hoped that Obama would’ve had more courage but a lot of people convinced him to make the wrong call.
> wasn't a winning argument at Nuremberg
For subordinates who executed the illegal actions. Within the command structure. Being in the command structure was important.
We did this for practical reasons. In Iraq, we fired the Ba’athist civilian state along with its military. So not only was the successor left without its bureaucracy, said bureaucracy was also unemployed. Ripe for the taking.
Legally, focussing on the originator and executor of an order is cleaner. It’s stark in a way involving every interlocutor isn’t.
> For subordinates who executed the illegal actions. Within the command structure. Being in the command structure was important.
For a fairly comparable role (foreign minister), Joachim von Ribbentrop was convicted (among other things, for "crimes against peace" and "deliberately planning a war of aggression") and executed at Nuremberg. Plenty of ministers in the list there.
It's hard to argue Kissinger wasn't involved in "deliberately planning a war of aggression" against Cambodia.
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