In an interview with The Washington Post
on Friday, former US secretary of state Henry Kissinger said that any
decision to go to war with Iran must be an American one, and not
subcontracted to Israel.
Kissinger emphasized: "We cannot subcontract the right to go to war. That is an American decision."
Discussing Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu's speech to the UN
General Assembly calling on the world to draw red lines on the Iranian
nuclear threat, Kissinger commented: "Should we make a public
announcement [on red lines] that can be used by Israel as a
justification for its going to war? That we cannot do."
Kissinger,
a Nobel Peace Prize winner, said that the US must define what it means
when it is says that nuclear weapons are unacceptable. He said the US
should draw a "private red line" which can be "publicly decided in terms
of tactical necessities."
The interview focused on the greatest foreign policy challenges facing the future president of the United States.
Commenting
on the upcoming US elections, Kissinger revealed: "I am endorsing
Governor Romney...he would conduct a responsible foreign policy. I won't
go beyond that."
Last July, during a keynote speech
at the opening of President Shimon Peres’s fourth annual Facing
Tomorrow conference, Kissinger noted that the UN Security Council has
stated for a decade that a military nuclear program in Iran was
unacceptable.
While now the world powers see a need for
diplomacy, Kissinger said that “a point will be reached where they will
have to define what they mean by unacceptable, and how that should be
implemented.”
This moment, Kissinger declared at the conference,
is approaching in the months ahead, “and it is something we should all
do together.”