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Movies Forum Index » Miscellaneous » Imperialist Propaganda? Notes on "Charlie Wilson's War"
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| Animaminima |
 Posted: Mon Jan 07, 2008 6:06 pm |
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Imperialist Propaganda Second Thoughts on Charlie
Wilson's War
by Chalmers Johnson
Published on Monday, January 7, 2008 by TomDispatch.com
http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/174877/chalmers_johnson_an_imperialist_comedy
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).
Copyright 2008 Chalmers Johnson |
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| Guest |
| Posted: Tue Jan 08, 2008 11:43 am |
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On 7 ene, 22:06, Animaminima <animamin...@yahoo.com> wrote:
Quote: 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."
Ignorance is strength. |
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| peace.seeker.27 |
| Posted: Tue Jan 08, 2008 2:29 pm |
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On Jan 7, 11:06 pm, Animaminima <animamin...@yahoo.com> wrote:
Quote: Imperialist Propaganda Second Thoughts on Charlie
Wilson's War
by Chalmers Johnson
Published on Monday, January 7, 2008 by TomDispatch.comhttp://www.tomdispatch.com/post/174877/chalmers_johnson_an_imperialis...
Review: Charlie Wilson's War -- James's Take
Posted Dec 21st 2007 9:02AM by James Rocchi
http://www.cinematical.com/2007/12/21/review-charlie-wilsons-war-jamess-take/
I didn't leave Charlie Wilson's War, the new film from director Mike
Nichols, dissatisfied or unamused. I walked out of Charlie Wilson's
War angry. No reasonable person expects a film -- any film -- to
capture the complexity and scope of real events with absolute
precision; adaptations are translations, and as the old Italian saying
goes, "The translator is a traitor." It's one thing to compress,
combine and fictionalize a story to fit the sprawling, ugly mess of it
onto the big screen; it's another to take only the best, shiniest
parts of a real, ugly story and turn it into a feel-good comedy.
Translation may be traitorous, but Charlie Wilson's War feels like a
conscious act of treason against reason itself. As film critic David
Thompson has said, "We learn our history from movies, and history
suffers ...." Charlie Wilson's War isn't just bad history; it feels
even more malign, like a conscious attempt to induce amnesia.
Based on George Crile's 2003 book of the same name, Charlie Wilson's
War follows the exploits of Charlie Wilson, a Democratic Congressman
from Texas who, during the '80s, had as much fun with his position as
you could, which was a lot. But as Charlie Wilson's War opens, we see
Charlie hot-tubbing in a Vegas hotel suite; the room's full of booze,
broads and blow. But Charlie, played by Tom Hanks, can't look away
from the news; as one of his new acquaintances notes her apathy to
world events, Charlie boils it down: "Dan Rather's wearing a turban;
you don't want to know why?" Dan Rather's in a turban because Dan
Rather's in Afghanistan, among the Afghan mujahideen -- the Islamic
rebels trying to drive the Soviet Union out of their country by any
means necessary. This sight sparks something in Charlie, so he sets
out to increase the C.I.A.'s funding for the Afghan rebels -- from $5
million a year to 10. It's a lot of money. It's going to be much more.
Charlie's desire to help puts him in contact with other like-minded
Americans -- like Joanne Herring (Julia Roberts), a Houston socialite
whose born-again Christian beliefs mean she'll support anyone against
the Godless communists, and Gust Avrakotos (Phillip Seymour Hoffman),
a C.I.A. man who's not a company man. Joanne and Gust can't imagine
anything worse than the Soviets capturing Afghanistan, and they work
with Charlie -- funneling money and arms through Pakistan, working
with a motley crew of arms dealers, spies, Saudi billionaires,
Pakistan's military dictator and other interested parties. Eventually,
the covert funding to help the mujahideen -- with no Congressional
oversight outside of closed committees -- was as high as a billion
dollars a year in the name of expelling the Soviets from Afghanistan.
And Charlie Wilson's War makes all of that look like great fun -- hard-
drinking, glad-handing, sneaky spy stuff. What isn't on screen in
Charlie Wilson's War -- but is, interestingly enough, in Aaron
Sorkin's script -- is any mention of the fact that the Afghan
mujahideen became the Taliban, or how the Afghan mujahideen were
helped in their cause by the "Afghan Arabs" who later became Al-Qaeda.
Sorkin's original script closes with an older, wiser sober Charlie on
a Washington morning shattered by a sudden loud noise; something's
burning at the Pentagon. His phone rings, and Charlie's wife says
"It's Gust. He says to turn on the TV."
In the version of the film actually shot, our finale is a closing
quote from Charlie, noting how his team got the Soviets out of
Afghanistan, but " ... we f***ed up the endgame." And no, I am not
saying that Mr. Wilson's actions led to 9-11; but I am saying there's
a link, and any reasonable student of history would agree. But there
are fewer and fewer students of history nowadays; more people will see
this film than will ever read Crile's book. And rest assured, I hate
the "'Blame America First" crowd as much as anyone; the only thing I
hate more, in fact, is the "Blame America Never" crowd. Yes, Charlie
Wilson's War notes that Wilson and his crew goofed up the 'endgame';
what it doesn't quite acknowledge is that to thousands of Afghans who
suffered under the Taliban and the armed forces of America and her
allies in Afghanistan, it wasn't, and isn't, a game.
The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan was a brutal violation of
international law; a grown-up would nonetheless ask if our cure was in
fact better than the disease. Charlie Wilson's War doesn't. (Again, a
line in Sorkin's script -- but not in the final film -- has Avrakotos
noting "Remember I said this: There's gonna be a day when we're gonna
look back and say 'I'd give anything if (Afghanistan) were overrun
with Godless communists.'") There is one scene, at the climax of the
film, where Gust confronts Charlie at their victory party -- about
declaring Afghanistan in safe hands, warning him that there may be
unintended consequences of their efforts, even slapping the drink out
of Charlie's hands -- so you know Gust means business. As Wilson
thinks, the soundtrack offers the slow, droning roar of a low-flying
plane. And that choice can't be accidental; it has to be a 9-11
reference, but at the same time, plenty of critics I've talked to
(including a 20-year veteran of the field) literally didn't notice the
sound effect. There's subtlety, and then there's invisibility. Nichols
offers us champagne-sparkle charm and whimsy and aw-shucks hijinks; if
a film really wants to tackle the covert actions of the Cold War and
their long-term consequences, it needs to provide short sharp shots of
truth as raw as whiskey, one after the other. We get the buzzy, boozy,
bonhomie of Charlie's crusade; what Nichols has done is eliminated the
historical hangover of unintended consequences. Charlie Wilson's War
is timid where it should be reckless, clever where it should be
cutting, funny where it should be fierce.
I haven't really spoken about the performances in Charlie Wilson's
War, because they're largely irrelevant. Hanks is mis-cast as a Texan;
Roberts is, as always, herself; Hoffman gets to rage and chew scenery,
but his character's deeper doubts are shoved off-screen for wacky
globetrotting adventures and well-dressed pluck on the part of Hanks
and Roberts. Reading Sorkin's script, I couldn't help but think that
again, big Hollywood had turned a sharp-toothed, snarling real story
into a neutered, nuzzling housepet. Charlie Wilson's War offers the
bright glare of star power instead of any real illumination; it's a
historical-political comedy without any history or politics. Nichols's
cut, gutted version offers a few cheery, breezy moments of rat-a-tat
comedy, but Charlie Wilson's War stops being funny when you realize
we're living in the sequel. |
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| Phlip |
| Posted: Tue Jan 08, 2008 7:57 pm |
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patpowersspam@gmail.com wrote:
Quote: On 7 ene, 22:06, Animaminima <animamin...@yahoo.com> wrote:
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."
Ignorance is strength.
The movie also somehow avoided saying "Ronald Reagan", or the equivalent, in any
of the dialog.
Or "George Bush"... |
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| *Anarcissie* |
| Posted: Thu Jan 10, 2008 9:54 am |
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On Jan 8, 7:29 pm, "peace.seeker.27" <vesuvian.doppelga...@lycos.com>
wrote:
Quote: On Jan 7, 11:06 pm, Animaminima <animamin...@yahoo.com> wrote:
Imperialist Propaganda Second Thoughts on Charlie
Wilson's War
by Chalmers Johnson
Published on Monday, January 7, 2008 by TomDispatch.comhttp://www.tomdispatch.com/post/174877/chalmers_johnson_an_imperialis...
...
again, big Hollywood had turned a sharp-toothed, snarling real story
into a neutered, nuzzling housepet. Charlie Wilson's War offers the
bright glare of star power instead of any real illumination; it's a
historical-political comedy without any history or politics. Nichols's
cut, gutted version offers a few cheery, breezy moments of rat-a-tat
comedy, but Charlie Wilson's War stops being funny when you realize
we're living in the sequel.
In that case, it isn't very good imperialist propaganda. Which
leads me to wonder why people are so upset by it.
Going from the decision of the American ruling class (or at
least part of it) to actively support anti-Communist forces in
Afghanistan (which long preceded the Soviet invasion) all
the way to 9/11 is a long, complex story. There is some
connection, but it was not the Taliban that attacked the
World Trade Center and the Pentagon. That those attacks
were blowback is not the sort of conclusion one can arrive
at merely by turning on the television, as both of these
critiques suggest. A larger story is needed -- the story
of American imperialism in general and its efforts in the
Middle East in particular. This movie, and the book it
came from, are not that story, and there is no use getting
mad about it. The point of the irony is out of the frame. |
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