Chalmers Johnson - Dismantling the Empire

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 as if 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 United States) 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 was 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 Lindqvist’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 coproducer 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 was 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 was 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.