Monday, December 24, 2007


Charlie Wilson's War & The Beauty Parlor Reaganites

Former Reagan officials are angry about the new Tom Hanks movie, Charlie Wilson's War. They say it aggrandizes how much a mere Texas Rep, a Democrat!, helped the Afghanis to forcibly eject Soviet occupiers. They dispute how much credit "the Avocado," CIA agent Gust Avrakatos, deserves for devising effective insurgency tactics. They claim Wilson and Avocado actively resisted sending Stinger missiles to the tribes, finally being overruled by Cap Weinberger, certified Cold War Hero. A blog called "Libertas" is one of many piling on the trope:
Sorry, Hollywood, THIS (Ronald Reagan) is the man who won the Cold War you wanted us to lose, not some cocaine-snorting, whore-mongering, alcoholic liberal… It was this man, the people who served him, Pope John Paul, Margaret Thatcher, the people in Eastern Europe who rose and followed the likes of Lech Walesa, our brave military, and a man named Ollie North who also sent covert arms to freedom fighters, but there will be no movies about him…
I'd love to see a movie about Ollie North! One which depicts a moral compass Heinrich Himmler would've loved, although of course the pic would have nothing to do with defeating the Soviets in Afghanistan. That's why there's a movie about a cocaine-snorting, whore-mongering alcoholic liberal who delivered enough money to a wholly insubordinant, down-and-dirty CIA agent to blow up every Russian in the country, an agent whom the Republicans hated, feared, and tried to get rid of. At one point, Avocado controlled 70% of the CIA's discretionary budget for the entire world. On top of that, Wilson and Bill Casey got the Saudi government to match the US funding buck-for-buck.

The bad liberals begged for Stinger missiles to give to the mujahedin, and it was the Reagan Administration which wouldn't send them. It was the Reagan Administration which held up the shipment of sniper rifles for nearly 5 years on fears they would be used to target Russian generals. (Finally the rifles were sent, but without the night vision goggles needed to make them effective.) It was the Reagan Administration which held back the good stuff, fearing it would offend Gorbachev.

Wilson and Avrakatos were flawed bit players who thought up a solution and pursued it with single-minded determination. Just pawns, really, of Zbigniew Brzenski's 1980 plan to stick Afghanistan up the same Commie ass which took his native Poland and killed family members and friends. (Z-Big was Carter's national security advisor.) Still, the grasping and whining from people widely praised for engineering a "Morning in America" (which, if it existed at all, was made possible by hard policies of their predecessors), is beyond unbecoming. It's yet another unfortunate confirmation that duplicitous, perpetually insecure glory-whores rarely change. Reagan's whores claim the movie is liberally biased, a low blow to conservatives because the screenplay was written by Aaron Sorkin, the creator of two Liberal Wet Dream White Houses portrayed on television series "The West Wing" and in Michael Douglas movie "The American President." Clearly, Aaron Sorkin wants all Republicans to be lined up against a wall and shot, ergo speaks with forked tongue.

That the Reaganistas are not remembered for treating Afghanistan like a snotty Kleenex while basking in political glory is too bad. Once the Russians pulled out, the Tough Guys were too timid and dim-witted to maintain any presence and funding. In their stupidity, they did not rebuild Afghanistan, preferring to create a power vacuum into which were sucked the spores of the Taliban. Kool-Aiders will claim stability wasn't their responsibility, they couldn't have known it would go bad, the Cold War was won anyway, the Taliban wasn't formed until the Clinton years, yadda yada. Of course, that's also saying ignorance of basic statecraft is wonderful. In keeping with Republican style.

Meanwhile, after the Russkies hauled ass, a rich Saudi national named Osama bin Laden (OBL) stayed on in Afghanistan to build roads, dams, and schools, to further promulgate the Muslim reformation (Al-Qaeda), and to build a network so loyal to him that he hasn't been turned in despite a $40 million reward. Again, the tropes proclaim no connection between the CIA and bin Laden, that he never got any direct US funding, and the events in Afghanistan and Pakistan had nothing to do with 9/11. The rabid Puggies don't seem to realize the dreaded librul Sorkin adapted the bothersome movie's screenplay from a book, one funnily enough called Charlie Wilson's War. And they're missing the central plot point:

What if, instead of Osama bin Laden, we were the ones who stayed on to build the roads, dams, and schools?

15 comments:

Jon said...

A "conservative" whining about a cocaine sniffing alcoholic in Congress? He must be glad we don't have one in the White House. Oh wait....

MarcLord said...

LOLOL! Merry Christmas, Jon, to you and all of yours.

Vigilante said...

Well done, Marc. I enjoyed the book & looking forward to the movie.

Vigilante said...

Sorry the You-Tube isn't available any longer...

MarcLord said...

Mr. Vig,

Thanks, I would like to get around to reading the book, which I'm sure must be voluminous and entertaining. Am going to see the movie soon enough; part of my interest in Afghanistan comes from having had some tertiary brushes with it, witting and not.

I'll look for a current (more lasting) YouTube version. Watched a very good 8-minute clip.

Jon said...

I just finished watching a two hour special on The History Channel that I recorded a week or two ago. It was quite good, interviews with the actual participants as well as "re-enactments." I recommend it, if they re-run it (I just checked the schedule and don't see anything coming up, but that can change....)

Vigilante said...

You take the absolutely and correct tack on Charlie Wilson's War. Charlie Wilson had nothing for which to apologize. I am fooking fed up with decade-late second guessers saying the muhedine (sp) shouldn't have been supplied with missiles and rifles that shoot straight. This was the first authentically non-'defensive' case of Soviet aggression and it begged for opposition and reversal. Those who second-guess Wilson and Avrakatos are those who argue that so-called Islamofascism is on the same level as Soviet communism and Fascism. They are asinine.

Vigilante said...

You'll find the book a quick read.

Jon said...

I think the correct lesson is to be careful of blowback. No one can expect any administration to predict the future, but history has shown that allow power vacuums to exist is not a good idea. Compare how the victorious allies treated Germany after WWI (revenge; disregard for its stability) with how they treated it after WWII (make it a safe place to be a future ally). Discuss amongst yourselfs.

MarcLord said...

Jon,

got to see @10 mins of the History Channel special (the same segments twice) before holiday duties intervened. Looked great.

Absolutely agreed, the message of Afghanistan is "Beware of Blowback," and ignorance of it is coming home to roost in Pakistan right now.

I don't think Wilson or Avocado were terribly farsighted, either, but they were thinking further than the Ollie North contingent or the developmentally challenged Richard Perle. But they had formed ideas about what Afghanistan needed to step into the 20th century, knew that the tribes could take an Iroquois Nations step forward, and they must have been very disappointed when the spigot got shut off cold turkey.

De-militarizing the border provinces in "Afgakistan" could only be accomplished with a strong, agnostic, and benevolent presence there after Najibullah. On the cheap.

Even after 9/11, it was still not too late for a Marshall Plan for Afghanistan, which would've attracted much multilateral, and quite tangible, support at the time. The opportunity was so obvious, I wrote the idea to Molly Ivins and she used it in one of her columns. Instead we were cajoled into taking nonsensical revenge on Afghanistan.

Jon said...

Great, now you made me sad by reminding me of our loss of Molly Ivins :(

MarcLord said...

Vig,

I can see some valid arguments to not send Stingers or night-sniper rifles, particularly in light of Russia's decaying economic base and impending collapse. (My hunches about a hollow bear, probably more than any other reason, is why I didn't go there. The adventure potential was undeniable.) The hard-liners preferred to think in terms of Juggernaut, but even then the arguments against supply were ultimately more paranoid than strategic, and few score Stinger missiles and sniper rifles weren't going to blow back by themselves.

The Reich Wing saw the tribes as expendable abstractions, and I suspect were already thinking in terms of future betrayals over oil pipelines, whereas Wilson and the Avocado saw and dealt with Afghanis as human beings with forceful personalities, the possibility of self-determination ahead of them.

Jon said...

According to The History Channel broadcast I mentioned, the mainstream CIA was afraid of two things regarding supplying the insurgents with Stinger missiles: 1) Soviets capturing some and reverse engineering them; and 2) Falling into Terrorist hands. The first fear was very real; it's easy to forget the fear endemic in the Cold War!

Another point was the fear of provoking the Soviets into attacking the U.S. or Europe by so openly supplying American material that the insurgents used to kill Soviet soldiers. Again, we tend to forget that this was the mighty Evil Empire that we were constantly being told had more missiles than us, etc. Now we realize that at the time the Military Industrial Complex was telling us all this about the imminent Soviet threat, their economy was so bad the empire would be gone in just a few years. Yet another Intelligence Failure....

MarcLord said...

Jon,

For reasons you'll see below, I'm not so forgiving, neither of mindsets nor decisions.

True, the CIA was "concerned" re: Soviets capturing the Stinger and reverse engineering them, but that was either bullshit or sheer ignorance. The Russian shoulder-fired SA-18'Grouse' was already deployed, with greatly improved target acquisition properties (reaction time, IR, anti-jamming, proximity fuse, wider target window) over the SA-7 Grail. It was somewhat lighter, roughly as effective, and far cheaper than the Stinger. It deployed in early 1984.

True, concerns about pissing off the Juggernaut and getting caught in a ground war colored everything. The US Army was widely thought to be on convalescent leave, and the CIA's attitude reflected the Reagan administration's basic political stance, i.e, that it was starting from a position of weakness. Accordingly, the Reaganites did take an "outspend them, up-the-ante" strategic approach which, in the orthodox historical record, "worked." Yet as we now know, Gorbachev visited ballistic scientist Shevardnadze at the time, who advised that Star Wars was ridiculous and defeating it was trivial (missiles can be steered).

http://www.foreignaffairs.org/20000301fareviewessay33/david-greenberg/the-empire-strikes-out-why-star-wars-did-not-end-the-cold-war.html

In late winter 1985, I walked into my university library, picked up the CIA world factbook, looked for articles in the Economist, etc on USSR. I then talked to a number of foreign policy professors, also two Russian defectors, one Pole, and to a communications professor I lived with who spent time in Afghanistan prior to the invasion. Within three weeks, a clear overall picture was forming.

Amongst other details, I learned the Russians had secretly been selling lots of gold starting in 1980. The CIA was well aware of this, and its own published estimates had the USSR economy in decline if not free-fall. Routinely, I was amongst virulent anti-communist hawks who automatically assumed I imbibed from the same punch bowl. Altogether, there was little doubt in my mind the USSR was falling fast, that Afghanistan was a huge mistake, with no doubt at all the Reaganites were hysterical carny barkers.

If a 21 year old kid could figure out in a few weeks that the Soviet Union was dying, one would expect professional military and intelligence strategists to do the same. Many were, but were obviously getting shot down, and I instinctively didn't want to work in such an environment. I would've rather sold heroin. Oh, right...Islamabad's the spot for that.

MarcLord said...

Correction to above post: I meant Gorbachev consulted with dissident soviet scientist Andre Sakharov, not foreign minister Shevardnadze.