[Anyone] The Truth about Charlie Wilson's War?
totem at laplaza.org
totem at laplaza.org
Tue Jan 15 11:45:09 MST 2008
> >
> >
> > > Tom Hanks' Charlie Wilson Movie: An Imperialist Comedy By Chalmers Johnson,
> Tomdispatch.com
> > > Posted on January 8, 2008, Printed on January 14, 2008
> > > http://www.alternet.org/story/73010/
> > > 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).
> > >
> > > � 2008 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
> > > View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/73010/
> > >
> > > ---------------------------------
> >
> >
> >
> >
> > --
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
>
>
>
> --
>
>
>
>
>
--
More information about the Anyone
mailing list