"But the torment of Bangladesh suggests a simpler truth: he meant what he said. In the spring of 1971, he and Nixon were faced with mass atrocities on a scale that, at least for Nixon, called to mind Hitler’s extermination of German Jews. To be sure, Pakistan had no gas chambers; Yahya was not Hitler; this was not the Holocaust. Still, although Nixon and Kissinger stood behind many dictatorships—in Brazil, Greece, Portugal, Indonesia, Iran, Spain, South Korea—this was an enormity that went beyond the workaday cruelties of statecraft, as Nixon himself understood. And yet in that dire circumstance, Nixon and Kissinger, in word and in deed, stood resolutely behind Pakistan’s murderous generals."