Newsgroup: it.politica.internazionale
Titolo: "Charlie Wilson's War",an Imperialist Comedy

"Charlie Wilson's War",an Imperialist Comedy
by Chalmers Johnson and Tom Engelhardt
Open Steve Coll's aptly titled book, Ghost Wars: The Secret History of
the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to
September 10, 2001, at almost any page and you're likely to find
something that makes a mockery of the film Charlie Wilson's War.
There, on p. 90, for instance, is the larger-than-life CIA director of
the era, William Casey, the "Catholic Knight of Malta educated by
Jesuits," who "believed fervently that by spreading the Catholic
Church's reach and power he could contain Communism's advance, or
reverse it." And, if you couldn't have the Church do it, as in
Afghanistan in the 1980s, then second best, Casey believed, were the
Islamic warriors of jihad, the more extreme the better, with whom, in
his religio-anticommunism, he believed himself to have much in common.
(The enemy of my enemy is my friend, after all.) Casey was, in fact,
an American jihadi, eager in the 1980s not just to defeat the Soviets
in Afghanistan, but to push "the Afghan jihad into the Soviet Union
itself." His CIA, while funding activities like translating the Koran
into Uzbek (Uzbekistan being, then, an SSR of the Soviet Union), was
also, through Pakistan's intelligence service, funneling a vast flow
of advanced weaponry regularly to the most extreme (and, even then,
anti-American) of Afghan jihadis.
I could go on, starting perhaps with the president Casey served,
Ronald Reagan, who declared the Afghan anti-Soviet fighters his CIA
director was running, partly with Saudi money, to be "the moral equal
of our founding fathers." None of this was exactly secret information,
or even hard to find, at the time that the movie Charlie Wilson's War
was being made - which makes it a top candidate for the most
politically bizarre, consciously dumb film of our era.
Two well-known entertainment-industry liberals, director Mike Nichols
and Aaron Sorkin (the man responsible for The West Wing), have tried
to take possession of part of that great anti-Soviet Afghan jihad for...
well, whom? The Democratic Party? As hopeless an undertaking as this
was, there was only one way to turn it and its horrific aftermath into
a feel-good, celebratory liberal film. So they wrote all the
Reaganauts out of the picture, which meant excising history from
history. They created a movie in which neither Ronald Reagan nor
William Casey even exists. You could easily think that the Afghan
operation had simply been run by Democratic Congressman Charlie Wilson
and a low-level CIA agent more or less on their own. Leaving out the
crucial cast of characters was, in this case, comparable to, but far
stranger than, what the propagandists of the former Soviet Union used
to do in airbrushing discredited leaders out of official photos.
Ronald who?
Coll's book was published in 2004. Chalmers Johnson's Blowback: The
Costs and Consequences of American Empire came out in 2000, 18 months
before the attacks of 9/11. Its prescient analysis made it a prophetic
text - and propelled it onto bestseller lists after the 9/11 attacks
(and "blowback," a CIA term of trade, into popular culture). Even
though he wrote that book well before those towers came down, Johnson
saw clearly that, while "American policies helped ensure that the
Soviet Union would suffer the same kind of debilitating defeat in
Afghanistan as the United States had in Vietnam ... in Afghanistan the
United States also helped bring to power the Taliban, a fundamentalist
Islamic movement." Even more important, he noted that the "mujahedeen,
who only a few years earlier the United States had armed with ground-
to-air Stinger missiles, grew bitter over American acts and polices" -
with consequences that were, even then, becoming apparent and would
soon enough culminate in a horrific blowback from a CIA-run operation
that had been deemed a great success.
Thank heavens, then, that Chalmers Johnson, whose magisterial book
Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic (the final volume of
his Blowback Trilogy) will be appearing in paperback this month, puts
a little history back into Charlie Wilson's War in his own inimitable
manner. Tom
Imperialist Propaganda
Second thoughts on Charlie Wilson's War
By Chalmers Johnson
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

 reverse it."
eh eh eh, l'onnipotente lobby gesuita che governa il mondo, con gran
dispiacere di nahum...