Chalmers Johnson, An Imperialist Comedy

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From TomDispatch.com

Tomgram: Chalmers Johnson, An Imperialist Comedy

Open Steve Coll's aptly titled book, Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001, at almost any page and you're likely to find something that makes a mockery of the film Charlie Wilson's War. There, on p. 90, for instance, is the larger-than-life CIA director of the era, William Casey, the "Catholic Knight of Malta educated by Jesuits," who "believed fervently that by spreading the Catholic Church's reach and power he could contain Communism's advance, or reverse it." And, if you couldn't have the Church do it, as in Afghanistan in the 1980s, then second best, Casey believed, were the Islamic warriors of jihad, the more extreme the better, with whom, in his religio-anticommunism, he believed himself to have much in common. (The enemy of my enemy is my friend, after all.) Casey was, in fact, an American jihadi, eager in the 1980s not just to defeat the Soviets in Afghanistan, but to push "the Afghan jihad into the Soviet Union itself." His CIA, while funding activities like translating the Koran into Uzbek (Uzbekistan being, then, an SSR of the Soviet Union), was also, through Pakistan's intelligence service, funneling a vast flow of advanced weaponry regularly to the most extreme (and, even then, anti-American) of Afghan jihadis.

I could go on, starting perhaps with the president Casey served, Ronald Reagan, who declared the Afghan anti-Soviet fighters his CIA director was running, partly with Saudi money, to be "the moral equal of our founding fathers." None of this was exactly secret information, or even hard to find, at the time that the movie Charlie Wilson's War was being made -- which makes it a top candidate for the most politically bizarre, consciously dumb film of our era.

Two well-known entertainment-industry liberals, director Mike Nichols and Aaron Sorkin (the man responsible for "The West Wing"), have tried to take possession of part of that great anti-Soviet Afghan jihad for… well, whom? The Democratic Party? As hopeless an undertaking as this was, there was only one way to turn it and its horrific aftermath into a feel-good, celebratory liberal film. So they wrote all the Reaganauts out of the picture, which meant excising history from history. They created a movie in which neither Ronald Reagan, nor William Casey even exists. You could easily think that the Afghan operation had simply been run by Democratic Congressman Charlie Wilson and a low-level CIA agent more or less on their own. Leaving out the crucial cast of characters was, in this case, comparable to, but far stranger than, what the propagandists of the former Soviet Union used to do in airbrushing discredited leaders out of official photos. Ronald who?

Full article: http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/174877/chalmers_johnson_an_imperialist_comedy