[R-G] [BillTottenWeblog] Tom Hanks' Charlie Wilson Movie: An Imperialist Comedy

[Bill Totten]

by Chalmers Johnson

Tomdispatch.com (January 06 2008)

AlterNet (January 08 2008)


I have some personal knowledge of Congressmen like Charlie Wilson
(Democrat, 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 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 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 US'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 US 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 US) 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 US 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).

Copyright (c) 2008 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.

http://www.alternet.org/story/73010/


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