[NYTr] Imperialist Propaganda: Chalmers Johnson on Charlie Wilson's War

[All the News That Doesn't Fit]

[An amusing essay about this stupid movie.-NYTr]

sent by Tim Murphy 

Tom Dispatch - Jan 6, 2008
http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/174877/chalmers_johnson_an_imperialist_comedy

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 twenty 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 September 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 U.S.S. 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
Mujahideen." 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 mujahideen ("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 U.S.S. 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 mujahideen 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 mujahideen were manipulated by Washington like so much cannon
fodder in order to give the USSR its own Vietnam. The mujahideen 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
fucked 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 film-maker 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
mujahideen";  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: "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).]