America's oldest war criminal

Today millions of Americans will pause from their barbecues and family gatherings to remember the American heroes who fought and died in the service of their country. This is altogether fitting, for even when the cause has not been just, they served, and risked all, on our behalf.

By coincidence, today is also the ninetieth birthday of a man who least deserves another day, not to speak of another year, of life. Unlike our fallen heroes, the life of Henry Kissinger is marked not by sacrifice but by self-aggrandizement, not by devotion to our founding ideals, but by their utter rejection.

Whether we speak of his direction of unrestrained bombing of civilian populations in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia, his engineering of Pinochet's coup d'etat against the democratically elected president of Chile, of which he observed,  "I don't see why we need to stand by and watch a country go communist due to the irresponsibility of its people. The issues are much too important for the Chilean voters to be left to decide for themselves," or his support for Indonesia's genocidal invasion of East Timor, we are speaking of a man who has become wealthy and gained the regard of political elites, all the while escaping any accounting for his crimes.

Today, remember our fallen heroes, but also spare a moment for the victims of America's oldest and most vicious war criminal, Henry Kissinger.