Hon. Henry Kissinger, "Where Do We Go From Here"

problem, second problem is, that Iraq has never been a nation before 1920.

Before 1920 it was covered as part of the Ottoman Empire, in three regions, a Kurdish, a Sunni effected Sunni region, and a Shiite region by different governments the third is that these very – and the Kurdish region – that these groups have an enormous sense of their identity. And the fourth is that they are split among each other, within each other, so that last weekend you had a battle between to Shiite groups in the southern part of Iraq. So a solution will have to have a military component, a political component, and something that has really not yet been addressed an international component, because whatever emerges in Iraq will have to get some kind of international recognition. Now I’m not going to stand here and pretend that I have the answer to all of these issues, but I do say, we as a nation will go, will have to consider the consequences of unwise decisions because this is not a problem that will end locally because as I said earlier the people who are contributing, producing this turmoil have a global perspective so that the consequences will spread. Now the main point I want to make here is after our election we are going to need a serious national debate…on where we should go in this respect.

And I am sure that the administration is going to play a major, make a major contribution to this, as will others, like various commissions. And this gets me back to where I started I’ve been outlived so long that history repeats itself in my own lifetime. I’ve seen some of these debates when I was responsible for part of the management of the crisis and now some of the same debates are starting again.

And the major thought I want to leave you with is, President Ford made many important contributions, but there is no contribution he made that was more important than the fact that he enabled Americans to be able to trust each other again. Whatever the disagreements were, I never heard him say a malicious word about his opponents and amazingly differed the mood in Washington. I can’t think of any malicious words that were said about him as a person. So this is the spirit that I hope will animate us, we are in a period of great complexity but it’s also a period in which unbelievable changes have taken place.

When I first came to China in 1971 if anyone had described to me what China looks like today I would have thought they were mad. So you have China, and India emerging as major features, you have Japan returning to a more national direction, you have a global economic system but a national political system. So we have huge tasks before us and they are on the whole the opportunities for creating a world order are as great than the dangers and we have to make them greater. I have a Chinese acquaintance who claims it is the fallen Chinese proverb as he claims because I’m not sure there are as many proverbs as they tell us, I think they make them up as they go along. But that proverb is suppose to go like this, when there is turmoil under the heavens little problems are dealt as though they are big problems and big problems aren’t dealt with at all. When there is order in the heavens big problems are reduced to little problems, and little problems should not obsess us. That’s the real challenge of our period and that is what we should keep in mind when we go through the headlines of the day that the world is in change that you cannot fix everything at the same time but you can move it in a beneficial direction.

And let me close this with a word of Winston Churchill he once said “sometimes