http://nhw.livejournal.com/1041920.ht...

Hitchens is of course a provocative and controversial writer. His main line of argument, once you cut through the rhetoric, is that uncritical American support for the Greek military junta - going right to the top, particularly Kissinger but also Nixon - emboldened the colonels to move against Makarios, and while Washington at best ignored the warning signs and at worst encouraged them. And when the colonels' rule collapsed along with their Cyprus adventure, US policy switched to a similarly uncritical enorsement of Turkey.

That much is clear. But I think Hitchens makes the classic mistake of enthusiasts for a particular country in assuming that there really was a US strategy. He says several times that partition had been the US policy on Cyprus since the Acheson plan of 1963. But the evidence he presents, particularly from the Johnson administration, makes it appear more likely that once it had become clear that the Acheson plan wasn't going anywhere, it was dropped as a policy objective; I don't believe that Kissinger especially cared whether Cyprus was partitioned or not.

While some of his details are questionable, Hitchens is right to castigate external actors for looking at Cyprus solely through their own selfish strategic lenses. But he doesn't spare the Cypriot leaders from criticism either. It seems to me that all actors are culpable for failing to put intercommunal relations on the island at the top of the agenda. If the international community as a whole had put a tenth of the effort into preserving the 1960 Cyprus constitution as it has put into preserving the 1995 Dayton Agreement in Bosnia, we would be looking at a very different story. ( )