Good time Charlie

By
Saul Landau                                                                          Read Spanish Version

George
Crile (Charlie
Wilson’s War,
2003) credits the Houston Congressman with convincing House Members
to overcome their valid doubts and keep funding Zia al Haq. Members
knew in 1979 that the Pakistani dictator had overthrown and murdered
President Zulfilcar Ali Bhutto (Benzir’s father), that his human
rights record was abominable and that he fostered a nuclear weapons
program
realized
in 1998.

You
won’t learn this (or about Wilson’s support for Nicaraguan tyrant
Anastasio Somoza) from Hollywood’s “Charlie Wilson’s War.”
Mike Nichols’ new film,
starring
Tom Hanks as the “good time” anti-communist congressman,
and
Julia
Roberts as a dyed blond, super wealthy Ann Coulter type who says God
intended the CIA to provide Afghan refugees with stinger missiles to
shoot down Soviet planes. Philip Seymour Hoffman plays a street-smart
Afghan desk chief. Unfortunately, this assemblage of talent cannot
dissolve Hollywood’s formula. Instead of shining light on current
bloody affairs in Pakistan and Afghanistan, the movie follows box
office instinct: obscure the important; stress the personal. Another
high budget glossy exercise in banality! 

“How
did we get into this mess?” asks a man waiting behind me at the
supermarket checkout while reading the headlines. In other words, why
should U.S. Middle East and Persian Gulf involvement impact lives of
citizens of the Republic? “Oil,” many will say. But few Americans
think of themselves as citizens of the world’s most powerful
empire. Traditional explanations blame foreigners or impulsive
Presidents for inflicting “messes” on our country albeit the U.S.
motives always result from noble attempts to bring democracy and
justice to lesser peoples.

History
texts have parroted “noble intentions” motives for U.S. policy
from “the war to end war” (WWI), through the war “to bring
democracy to the Middle East” (Iraq). Films and TV series assume
the U.S. has shouldered the burden of world management as an
unfortunate obligation. Hollywood often promotes supposedly political
releases as “based on a true story.” A hero intervenes in other
countries’ affairs to save the world, or rescue a babe.

Mike
Nichols used this formula for “Charlie Wilson’s War.” He
assembled worthy actors to show how a noble, naïve and
fun-loving American — with no righteous cause through which to vent
his sexually oriented energies — can push U.S. power to stumble and
bumble its way into the contemporary quagmire of Middle Eastern wars
and Al Qaeda terrorism.

The
endearing Congressman
serves
wealthy patrons from his congressional office while luxuriating naked
with strippers, drinks and cocaine in a hot tub. Then,
serendipitously, his eye glances at Dan Rather on TV disguised as a
mujahadeen
broadcasting from Afghanistan, describing the virtuous plight of
those anti-communist rebels.

Charlie
experiences an epiphany, blows off the babes and sets out to redeem
himself — like Forrest
Gump
with more developed faculties pursuing his soul’s upright path:
Even though the Afghan rebels believe in Islam, their anti-Communism
serves as a redeeming virtue, as if God created commies so that good
guys could slay them.

This
film recipe requires a stodgy bureaucracy to overcome. The late 1970s
CIA fills the bill, having lost its appetite for costly covert
adventures in far off places — and rightly so. Since the Agency
lacks the will to push Congress for more money to supply eager
anti-commies, Charlie — with Joanne’s moral and sexual support —
convinces his Committee chairman that freedom-loving Americans need
to kill bad Russians. 

Although
eager to pursue the build-up of the covert weapons budget from $5
million to over $1 billion, the CIA heavy — Gust Avrakotos, a
take-no-shit Greek-American, head of the Afghan desk — introduces
mild ambiguity to temper the zeal of the playboy Congressman. Noble
intentions don’t always produce positive results. An instant of
wisdom in a foolish film! The real Avrakotos advised the Greek
colonels who overthrew the government in 1967and helped them
establish a dictatorship.

Hanks
and Roberts run the obstacle gauntlet — another adventure film
prescription. The audience hopes lover-boy cum missionary will
persuade more cynical Committee members to vote taxpayers’ money to
satisfy the righteous Afghan patriots. Nichols shows refugees in
Pakistan begging for food and pleading for weapons. With hand-held
ground to air missiles and anti-tank weapons they can destroy the
evil Soviets and reclaim their country for Allah.

The
film characters neglect to mention that these Russian killers hated
not just communism but anything western. Nichols says he intended to
create “moral ambiguity” — raise questions but not offer
answers. “You don’t know the consequences of any act,” Nichols
says. “You don’t know good things from bad things when they’re
coming at you, and sometimes [you don’t know] for 10 or 20 years,
or ever — because good and bad things keep turning into one
another.” (NPR Morning Edition, Dec. 20, 2007)

Some
lessons get learned, like not touching hot stoves; but not the lesson
of initiating expensive covert operations to alter other people’s
destinies, especially if you’re ignorant of the nature of people
you’re arming and financing! Mike Nichols shows Pakistani tyrants
and generals as sincere anti-communist allies at a time when they
coveted the aid to help develop nuclear weapons and promote an
Islamic state.

Charlie
Wilson and the anorexic Herring — like CIA fanatics — wanted to win
the Cold War. For them, freedom meant everyone should be able to sit
naked in a hot tub, sip whiskey and snort coke. But, by the 1980s,
the CIA knew the futility of trying to export the U.S. order. The
Vietnam War was only five years gone. More importantly, the CIA knew
Cold War propaganda had inflated the Soviet threat and underestimated
its weakness. Indeed, looking back, the Cold War provided
rationalization for financing unnecessary weapons, as if
sophisticated nuclear technology would protect the world against
Soviet threats and provide democracy. Now that same expensive crap
drains the U.S. budget — seventeen years after the excuse, USSR,
imploded. The original motive for super costly nukes and lush covert
ops has disappeared. But the dangerous spiral of nuclear weapons
production continues while Bush announces a new covert op plan for
Pakistan in the wake of Bhuto’s assassination. 

Covert
operations don’t forge democracy. They smash it as they did in Iran
(1953), Guatemala (1954), Brazil (1964), Indonesia (1965), Greece
(1967), Chile (1970-73) — to name a few examples. U.S. policy
subverts democracy; it doesn’t spread it. Even in Charlie’s war,
government officials ignored post Soviet Afghanistan planning; they
only wanted to “win.” 

Charlie’s
humanitarian impulse runs rampant in liberal culture. Help poor
Afghans solve problems so they can have a decent country — as if!
Where was this humanitarian impulse when Nixon and Kissinger decided
in 1970 to overthrow Allende and his elected government in Chile?

The
imperial conspirators like Nixon and Kissinger collaborated with
“Quiet Americans” (the CIA anti-hero from Graham Greene’s
novel) and fashioned and idealized rhetoric to sell the public myths:
the government wants to improve third world life, so those ignorant
people will adopt U.S. commercial culture and get happy like Charlie.

Do-good
Charlie helped Afghanistan on its road to Hell. The Soviets — like
the U.S. in Vietnam — slaughtered civilians after they intervened in
late 1979, but ironically key U.S. officials had hoped the Soviets
would invade. Zbignew Brzezinski, Jimmy Carter’s National Security
Advisor, wanted to draw the Russians into “the Afghan trap.” Zbig
told Le
Nouvel Observateur
that “The day that the Soviets officially crossed the border,” I
wrote to President Carter. “We now have the opportunity of giving
to the USSR its Vietnam War.” Carter agreed and in July 1979
authorized covert aid to the mujahadeen.

Charlie
facilitated and enlarged a small scale process. By personifying the
Afghan covert op, Hollywood trivialized human tragedy, turning a
volatile congressional clown into good box office.

Aaron
Sorkin’s script avoids sticky details: who received the $1 billion
released by Charlie’s largesse and what did they do with it? The
real Charlie became Santa Claus to corrupt war lords. In post Soviet
Afghanistan these heavies battled each other, creating conditions
that allowed the Taliban to prevail.

The
movie ends with Wilson pleading to fellow Committee Members in vain
for a million dollars for Afghan schools. The film does show Congress
eschewing interest in aid that’s not for fighting commies,
terrorists or drug cartels. The CIA honors Charlie. The screen goes
blank. “It was a glorious victory and then we f’d up the endgame.” 

Huh?
A chess match? A morality tale? Or a film to justify naked partying
and coke snorting as partners to noble life causes, like fighting
communism? In the end, freedom and fun go together in America — like
marriage and divorce, life and suicide,
aiding
anti-communist Afghan guerrillas in the 1980s and getting terrorized
on 9/11/2001!

Saul
Landau is an Institute for Policy Studies Fellow. Read his A
BUSH AND BOTOX WORLD.
See his WE
DON’T PLAY GOLF HERE,
on DVD through roundworldproductions@gmail.com