Honor among warmongers
by digby
A tribute to Henry Kissinger from St John McCain:
For several years, a long time ago, I struggled to preserve my honor in a situation where it was severely tested. The longer you struggle with something, the more you come to cherish it. And after a while, my honor, which in that situation was entirely invested in my relations and the reputation I had with my fellow POWs, became not just my most cherished possession, it was my only possession. I had nothing else left.
When Henry came to Hanoi to conclude the agreement that would end America’s war in Vietnam, the Vietnamese told him they would send me home with him. He refused the offer. “Commander McCain will return in the same order as the others,” he told them. He knew my early release would be seen as favoritism to my father and a violation of our code of conduct. By rejecting this last attempt to suborn a dereliction of duty, Henry saved my reputation, my honor, my life, really. And I’ve owed him a debt ever since.
So, I salute my friend and benefactor, Henry Kissinger, the classical realist who did so much to make the world safer for his country’s interests, and by so doing safer for the ideals that are its pride and purpose. And who, out of his sense of duty and honor, once saved a man he never met.
And yet Marines are bound to never leave a comrade on the battlefield, no matter what. I guess I'll never understand this sort of thing.
And I have to wonder --- was the honorable McCain the only one Kissinger refused to take with him or were there others who might have been a little less concerned about their honer and more concerned about their sanity? Did any of them suffer more terribly because Kissinger cared more about their "honor" than their lives? (Actually, I doubt very seriously that Kissinger gave a damn about McCain's honer either --- the POWs were just negotiating chips for him.)
I don't think it's dishonorable at all to want to get out of such a hellish situation and anyone who did would be just as heroic in my eyes as ones who were left behind. Indeed, John McCain could have come back and agitated against that sickening, stupid war --- and all the sickening stupid wars that came in its wake --- instead of becoming the fiercest warmonger in the US Senate for more than 30 years. (Really, I can't think of a war he didn't back, regardless of the party affiliation in the White House.) Perhaps that's too much to ask of a man from an elite Naval family who never quite measured up, but he could have been a little less ostentatious in his blood lust over the years.
And the idea that the war criminal known as Henry Kissinger preserved his honor by leaving him in that hellhole is so twisted I can't even wrap my mind around it.
They deserve each other.
Oh and by the way, the attraction so many erstwhile liberals are feeling for that creep Chris Christie draws from the very same yearning for a warrior chief that animated so much of the DC press corps in the 2000 election when they deified McCain as the one true, independent real man in politics. The signs of locker room appreciation are all over the place.
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