Posted on 12/17/2010 10:02:34 PM PST by TheMole
This week, the Globe and Mail asked General Lewis McKenzie (Retired) to write the obituary of American diplomat Richard Holbrooke.
It was a good idea. The two men had crossed paths more than once on the global stage of the Great Game.
McKenzie declined. Holbrooke had just died and the general knew that what he had to say would hardly produce the standard panegyric.
When I caught up with McKenzie, he was shoveling snow after a spell away from home. I asked for an interview and to my surprise, he agreed.
“I’m just going to tell you what I thought of him through my own prism. All of my experiences with Holbrooke were all bad.” The men were both involved in Vietnam. Holbrooke was Henry Kissinger’s primary assistant at the time of the Paris Peace Accords. McKenzie was part of the International Commission of Control and Supervision. “It wasn’t an accord at all, it was just a way of getting the U.S. out of the war. They just wanted diplomatic cover to get the troops out. And of course you know what happened next.”
On Friday March 13, 1992, McKenzie arrived in Sarajevo as part of a United Nations Protection Force. Holbrooke was part of the American diplomatic effort. The Portuguese ambassador had already brokered an accord between the combatants which would have seen the “canonization” of Bosnia. But U.S. Ambassador Warren Zimmerman advised Bosnian Muslim leader Alija Izetbegovic to turn the plan down. Three years later, virtually the same plan was adopted with thousands killed in the interim.
“The war was for nothing. The Serbs had already committed to Dayton after the Croatian offensive in southwest Bosnia. Clearly the bombing was unwarranted. And that is the real history not the myth. I don’t think Holbrooke had a positive influence on the Balkans.” And then, in 1999, there was Kosovo, where Holbrooke played a role.
“We had NATO bombing a sovereign country on behalf of the Kosovo Liberation Army, (KLA) a listed terrorist group. Now we have the president of Kosovo mixed up in an organ-harvesting ring. Unfortunately, Canada is one of the 72 countries at the UN that recognized Kosovo.” Diplomat Richard Holbrooke and soldier Lewis McKenzie met face-to-face on U.S. network television in the wake of 9/11. With millions of furious Americans watching, Holbrooke leveled an accusation that has “peed off” the general ever since.
“We were on Ted Koppel’s Nightline. Holbrooke said ‘General McKenzie, it is my understanding that all the terrorists who flew planes into the Twin Towers came on a ferry from Yarmouth, Nova Scotia to Bar Harbor Maine.’ ” The general’s cousin, owner of McKenzie Security, was responsible for that ferry run and the soldier knew that the diplomat was out to lunch.
“I was absolutely livid. That was the start of the myth of how the 9/11 terrorists came through Canada and executed their attack.”
Holbrooke re-emerged when the Democrats swept to power in 2008, but General McKenzie wasn’t cheering.
“When I heard that Obama had appointed him envoy to Af-Pak, I couldn’t think of a worse personality to put in that job. Rest his soul, and yes, I admired his intellect, but the man was a bully.”
No one, not even in death, bullies the general.
mharris@cfra.com
Thank you for the perspective. The stories painting Holbrooke as some kind of diplomatic martyr were starting to grate on me. Good qualities he probably had-but the man was no peacemaker.
Finally a military figure (and a Canadian one at that) who has the guts to tell the truth about Holbrooke.
This should be expanded into a major news story/article and distributed around the world.
Wow! I thought that after 40 years in the journalism field re Vietnam, etc., I had heard everything to be said about Holbrooke but I’m glad I was wrong.
What else does the General know that we should know about Bosnia, Kosovo, etc.?
vaudine
Finally!
I'm glad to hear a general put it like that. Using NATO to invade a sovereign country to settle an internal dispute set a precedent and a very ugly and dangerous one. It is not ridiculous to think that one day NATO will send in troops to deal with the problem on our border with Mexico.
Paging Michael Barone, Mr. Barone please pick up!
Holbrooke Thought Highly of Himself, for Good Reason
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2643430/posts
That people die because of stupid mistakes and ego trips made by petty Little People running their own agendas, makes me sick to my stomach.
“I was absolutely livid. That was the start of the myth of how the 9/11 terrorists came through Canada and executed their attack.”
Before the 9/11 attacks, the most interesting one was how Al Hassam got caught because an actual US border guard used simple profiling to nab him in his New Year’s attempt to blow up Times Square. He was going thru the Canada US border in BC.
On a certain stretch of Avenue in Vancouver close to where I grew up, ONE BLOCK of motels separates where Al Hassam planned the bomb run and where the Green River killer, Wa state’s most hideous murderer used to “vacation” while in Vancouver.
I had the pleasure of hearing Gen. McKenzie speak a number of years ago. Two stories he told stuck with me.
1. When in the Balkans, his orders where to not have his troops return hostile fire unless he got permission from some NATO or UN beaurocrat in NYC. He urgently needed this permission, had to track the guy down at some cocktail party, whereupon the guy didn’t even know who he was.
2. The second story involved the Queen of England and totally changed my perception of her. Apparently the Queen was fully up to speed in reading his top secret NATO reports. She asked for a private meeting the next time he was in London. They met wherein she quizzed him on what was going on in the Balkans. It surprised me she was so interested/involved in the goings on in the world.
All in all, I thought he was a candid common sense guy.
Holbrooke was always Hillary’s tool - right up to the day he died in a meeting with her.
Thousands and thousands and thousands of utterly unnecessary dead as a result of the paranoid, megalomaniacal schemes of these psychopathic screwups.
When will people learn?
I wasn’t aware the Green River killer vacationed in Vancouver. What Avenue are you referring to?
Kingsway Ave.
Let me re-phrase that: it was the same motel where the Green River Killer and Al Hassam hatched the NY terrorist dry run before 9/11. I remember it as the 2400 Motel and it’s still standing.
2400 Court Motel. I think it was recently torn down. I did not know those facts. Thanks.
an ignorant malicious arrogant bully
RIP Mr. Holbrooke, but we don’t need to pretend you are some diplomatic giant
Right here at FR we watched Bosnia unfold. We always said The Toon held back the bombers but it was Hillary who got to him.
yitbos
When voters start noticing that these Ivy League tools aren’t half as smart as the press (more Ivy League tools) think they are.
The single best criterion I have developed for determining whether someone is a fool/tool/idiot in government or upper management in the private sector is the presence of Ivy League affiliation on their CV.
Holbrooke went to both Brown and Princeton. He therefore was bound to be almost as fecklessly idiotic as someone who attended Yale & Harvard... or Columbia and Harvard.
WFB once posited that he’d rather be governed by the first 400 names in the Boston phone directory than the faculty of
Harvard.
Today, I’d say that the single best way out of our troubles would be to exile anyone in government or upper management with an Ivy League pedigree to an island with no way off (let them figure out how to build a canoe or something) and simply draft replacements from the voting rolls. Just walk up to people’s front door and say “Hi, are you John Q. Brainsample? You’ve voted in the last six elections, yes? Get your crap, you’re coming with us. No, you don’t have a choice. You’re going to be in Congress for the next two years....”
Excellent assessment, by one of America’s finest.
Yes, I knew that...thank you so much for posting it.
He's been interviewed extensively and wrote a book about his experiences in the former Yugoslavia.
I used to wonder about some of his views but with the passage of time pretty much everything he ever said now looks to be fairly accurate. I linked to his Wikipedia entry just so Freepers would be clear on who he is and what he's done, but that entry appears to have been written by a left-liberal Canadian angry that MacKenzie was a candidate for the Conservative Party.
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