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Imperialist
Propaganda
Second
thoughts on Charlie Wilson's War
By Chalmers Johnson
07/01/08 "TomDispatch"
-- -- I have some personal knowledge of congressmen like
Charlie Wilson (D-2nd District, Texas, 1973-1996) because, for
close to 20 years, my representative in the 50th Congressional
District of California was Republican Randy "Duke" Cunningham,
now serving an eight-and-a-half-year prison sentence for
soliciting and receiving bribes from defense contractors. Wilson
and Cunningham held exactly the same plummy committee
assignments in the House of Representatives – the Defense
Appropriations Subcommittee plus the Intelligence Oversight
Committee – from which they could dole out large sums of public
money with little or no input from their colleagues or
constituents.
Both men flagrantly abused their
positions – but with radically different consequences.
Cunningham went to jail because he was too stupid to know how to
game the system – retire and become a lobbyist – whereas Wilson
received the Central Intelligence Agency Clandestine Service's
first "honored colleague" award ever given to an outsider and
went on to become a $360,000 per annum lobbyist for Pakistan.
In a secret ceremony at CIA
headquarters on June 9, 1993, James Woolsey, Bill Clinton's
first director of central intelligence and one of the agency's
least competent chiefs in its checkered history, said: "The
defeat and breakup of the Soviet empire is one of the great
events of world history. There were many heroes in this battle,
but to Charlie Wilson must go a special recognition." One
important part of that recognition, studiously avoided by the
CIA and most subsequent American writers on the subject, is that
Wilson's activities in Afghanistan led directly to a chain of
blowback that culminated in the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and
led to the United States' current status as the most hated
nation on earth.
On May 25, 2003 (the same month
George W. Bush stood on the flight deck of the USS Abraham
Lincoln under a White-House-prepared "Mission Accomplished"
banner and proclaimed "major combat operations" at an end in
Iraq), I published a
review in the Los Angeles Times of the book that
provides the data for the film Charlie Wilson's War. The
original edition of the book carried the subtitle, "The
Extraordinary Story of the Largest Covert Operation in History –
the Arming of the Mujahedeen." The 2007 paperbound edition was
subtitled, "The Extraordinary Story of How the Wildest Man in
Congress and a Rogue CIA Agent Changed the History of Our
Times." Neither the claim that the Afghan operations were covert
nor that they changed history is precisely true.
In my review of the book, I
wrote,
"The Central Intelligence
Agency has an almost unblemished record of screwing up every
'secret' armed intervention it ever undertook. From the
overthrow of the Iranian government in 1953 through the rape of
Guatemala in 1954, the Bay of Pigs, the failed attempts to
assassinate Fidel Castro of Cuba and Patrice Lumumba of the
Congo, the Phoenix Program in Vietnam, the 'secret war' in Laos,
aid to the Greek Colonels who seized power in 1967, the 1973
killing of President Allende in Chile, and Ronald Reagan's
Iran-Contra war against Nicaragua, there is not a single
instance in which the Agency's activities did not prove acutely
embarrassing to the United States and devastating to the people
being 'liberated.' The CIA continues to get away with this
bungling primarily because its budget and operations have always
been secret and Congress is normally too indifferent to its
Constitutional functions to rein in a rogue bureaucracy.
Therefore the tale of a purported CIA success story should be of
some interest.
"According to the author of
Charlie Wilson's War, the exception to CIA incompetence
was the arming between 1979 and 1988 of thousands of Afghan
mujahedeen ('freedom fighters'). The Agency flooded Afghanistan
with an incredible array of extremely dangerous weapons and
'unapologetically mov[ed] to equip and train cadres of high tech
holy warriors in the art of waging a war of urban terror against
a modern superpower [in this case, the USSR].'
"The author of this glowing
account, [the late] George Crile, was a veteran producer for the
CBS television news show 60 Minutes and an exuberant Tom
Clancy-type enthusiast for the Afghan caper. He argues that the
U.S.'s clandestine involvement in Afghanistan was 'the largest
and most successful CIA operation in history,' 'the one morally
unambiguous crusade of our time,' and that 'there was nothing so
romantic and exciting as this war against the Evil Empire.'
Crile's sole measure of success is killed Soviet soldiers (about
15,000), which undermined Soviet morale and contributed to the
disintegration of the Soviet Union in the period 1989 to 1991.
That's the successful part.
"However, he never once
mentions that the 'tens of thousands of fanatical Muslim
fundamentalists' the CIA armed are the same people who in 1996
killed nineteen American airmen at Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, bombed
our embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998, blew a hole in the
side of the USS Cole in Aden Harbor in 2000, and on
September 11, 2001, flew hijacked airliners into New York's
World Trade Center and the Pentagon."
Where Did the "Freedom
Fighters" Go?
When I wrote those words I did
not know (and could not have imagined) that the actor Tom Hanks
had already purchased the rights to the book to make into a film
in which he would star as Charlie Wilson, with Julia Roberts as
his right-wing Texas girlfriend Joanne Herring, and Philip
Seymour Hoffman as Gust Avrakotos, the thuggish CIA operative
who helped pull off this caper.
What to make of the film (which
I found rather boring and old-fashioned)? It makes the U.S.
government look like it is populated by a bunch of whoring,
drunken sleazebags, so in that sense it's accurate enough. But
there are a number of things both the book and the film are
suppressing. As I noted in 2003,
"For the CIA legally to carry
out a covert action, the president must sign off on – that is,
authorize – a document called a 'finding.' Crile repeatedly says
that President Carter signed such a finding ordering the CIA to
provide covert backing to the mujahedeen after
the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan on December 24, 1979. The
truth of the matter is that Carter signed the finding on July 3,
1979, six months before the Soviet invasion, and he did
so on the advice of his national security adviser, Zbigniew
Brzezinski, in order to try to provoke a Russian incursion.
Brzezinski has confirmed this sequence of events in an interview
with a French newspaper, and former CIA Director [today
Secretary of Defense] Robert Gates says so explicitly in his
1996 memoirs. It may surprise Charlie Wilson to learn that his
heroic mujahedeen were manipulated by Washington like so much
cannon fodder in order to give the USSR its own Vietnam. The
mujahedeen did the job but as subsequent events have made clear,
they may not be all that grateful to the United States."
In the bound galleys of Crile's
book, which his publisher sent to reviewers before publication,
there was no mention of any qualifications to his portrait of
Wilson as a hero and a patriot. Only in an "epilogue" added to
the printed book did Crile quote Wilson as saying, "These things
happened. They were glorious and they changed the world. And the
people who deserved the credit are the ones who made the
sacrifice. And then we f*cked up the endgame." That's it. Full
stop. Director Mike Nichols, too, ends his movie with Wilson's
final sentence emblazoned across the screen. And then the
credits roll.
Neither a reader of Crile nor a
viewer of the film based on his book would know that, in talking
about the Afghan freedom fighters of the 1980s, we are also
talking about the militants of al-Qaeda and the Taliban of the
1990s and 2000s. Amid all the hoopla about Wilson's going out of
channels to engineer secret appropriations of millions of
dollars to the guerrillas, the reader or viewer would never
suspect that, when the Soviet Union withdrew from Afghanistan in
1989, President George H.W. Bush promptly lost interest in the
place and simply walked away, leaving it to descend into one of
the most horrific civil wars of modern times.
Among those supporting the
Afghans (in addition to the U.S.) was the rich, pious Saudi
Arabian economist and civil engineer Osama bin Laden, whom we
helped by building up his al-Qaeda base at Khost. When bin Laden
and his colleagues decided to get even with us for having been
used, he had the support of much of the Islamic world. This
disaster was brought about by Wilson's and the CIA's
incompetence as well as their subversion of all the normal
channels of political oversight and democratic accountability
within the U.S. government. Charlie Wilson's war thus turned out
to have been just another bloody skirmish in the expansion and
consolidation of the American empire – and an imperial
presidency. The victors were the military-industrial complex and
our massive standing armies. The billion dollars' worth of
weapons Wilson secretly supplied to the guerrillas ended up
being turned on ourselves.
An Imperialist Comedy
Which brings us back to the
movie and its reception here. (It has been banned in
Afghanistan.) One of the severe side effects of imperialism in
its advanced stages seems to be that it rots the brains of the
imperialists. They start believing that they are the bearers of
civilization, the bringers of light to "primitives" and
"savages" (largely so identified because of their resistance to
being "liberated" by us), the carriers of science and modernity
to backward peoples, beacons and guides for citizens of the
"underdeveloped world."
Such attitudes are normally
accompanied by a racist ideology that proclaims the intrinsic
superiority and right to rule of "white" Caucasians. Innumerable
European colonialists saw the hand of God in Darwin's discovery
of evolution, so long as it was understood that He had
programmed the outcome of evolution in favor of late Victorian
Englishmen. (For an excellent short book on this subject, check
out Sven Lindquist's
Exterminate All the Brutes.)
When imperialist activities
produce unmentionable outcomes, such as those well known to
anyone paying attention to Afghanistan since about 1990, then
ideological thinking kicks in. The horror story is suppressed,
or reinterpreted as something benign or ridiculous (a "comedy"),
or simply curtailed before the denouement becomes obvious. Thus,
for example, Melissa Roddy, a Los Angeles filmmaker with inside
information from the Charlie Wilson production team,
notes that
the film's happy ending came about because Tom Hanks, a
co-producer as well as the leading actor, "just can't deal with
this 9/11 thing."
Similarly, we are told by
another insider reviewer, James Rocchi, that the scenario, as
originally written by Aaron Sorkin of West Wing fame,
included the following line for Avrakotos: "Remember I said
this: There's going to be a day when we're gonna look back and
say 'I'd give anything if [Afghanistan] were overrun with
Godless communists.'" This line is
nowhere to be found in the final film.
Today there is ample evidence
that, when it comes to the freedom of women, education levels,
governmental services, relations among different ethnic groups,
and quality of life – all were infinitely better under the
Afghan communists than under the Taliban or the present
government of President Hamid Karzai, which evidently controls
little beyond the country's capital, Kabul. But Americans don't
want to know that – and certainly they get no indication of it
from Charlie Wilson's War, either the book or the film.
The tendency of imperialism to
rot the brains of imperialists is particularly on display in the
recent spate of articles and reviews in mainstream American
newspapers about the film. For reasons not entirely clear, an
overwhelming majority of reviewers concluded that Charlie
Wilson's War is a "feel-good comedy" (Lou Lumenick in the
New York Post), a "high-living, hard-partying jihad" (A.O.
Scott in the New York Times), "a sharp-edged, wickedly
funny comedy" (Roger Ebert in the Chicago Sun-Times).
Stephen Hunter in the Washington Post wrote of "Mike
Nichols's laff-a-minute chronicle of the congressman's crusade
to ram funding through the House Appropriations Committee to
supply arms to the Afghan mujahedeen"; while, in a piece
entitled "Sex! Drugs! (and Maybe a Little War)," Richard L.
Berke in the New York Times offered this
stamp of approval: "You can make a movie that is relevant
and intelligent – and palatable to a mass audience – if its
political pills are sugar-coated."
When I saw the film, there was
only a guffaw or two from the audience over the raunchy sex and
sexism of "good-time Charlie," but certainly no laff-a-minute.
The root of this approach to the film probably lies with Tom
Hanks himself, who, according to Berke, called it "a serious
comedy." A few reviews qualified their endorsement of Charlie
Wilson's War, but still came down on the side of good old
American fun. Rick Groen in the Toronto Globe and Mail,
for instance,
thought that it was "best to enjoy Charlie Wilson's War
as a thoroughly engaging comedy. Just don't think about it too
much or you may choke on your popcorn." Peter Rainer
noted in the Christian Science Monitor that the
"Comedic Charlie Wilson's War has a tragic punch line."
These reviewers were thundering along with the herd while still
trying to maintain a bit of self-respect.
The handful of truly critical
reviews have come mostly from blogs and little-known Hollywood
fanzines – with one major exception, Kenneth Turan of the Los
Angeles Times. In an essay
subtitled "Charlie Wilson's War celebrates events
that came back to haunt Americans," Turan called the film "an
unintentionally sobering narrative of American shouldn't-have"
and added that it was "glib rather than witty, one of those
films that comes off as being more pleased with itself than it
has a right to be."
My own view is that if
Charlie Wilson's War is a comedy, it's the kind that goes
over well with a roomful of louts in a college fraternity house.
Simply put, it is imperialist propaganda, and the tragedy is
that four-and-a-half years after we invaded Iraq and destroyed
it, such dangerously misleading nonsense is still being offered
to a gullible public. The most accurate review so far is James
Rocchi's summing-up for
Cinematical.com: "Charlie Wilson's War isn't just bad
history; it feels even more malign, like a conscious attempt to
induce amnesia."
Chalmers Johnson is the
author of the Blowback Trilogy – Blowback (2000), The Sorrows of
Empire (2004), and Nemesis: The Last Days of the American
Republic (paperbound edition, January 2008).
Copyright 2008 Chalmers Johnson
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