Charlie Wilson s War: The Extraordinary Story of How the Wildest Man in Congress and a Rogue CIA Agent Changed the History of Our Times
CDN$ 6.99
An Unbelievable Tale of Hijacking the American Government - When anyone sets out to establish the historical record of any particularly murky period of history like the 1980s and the collapse of Communism, they would be well advised to have researched their facts. This was an era of limited American foreign policy and domestic initiatives because the country was still recovering from the humiliations of Vietnam and Watergate. The US was looking for a chance to redeem itself at the expense of its mortal enemy, the evil Soviet Empire. Its security and intelligence forces were at their low ebb in terms of achieving any major successes in the field. The CIA, with the unflattering revelations of agents like Philip Agee, was an agency mired in great trouble. The ultimate knock on the chin came with the Iranian hostage debacle. Into this growing quagmire of indecision and questionable leadership stepped a loud, self-serving, bluff Texan congressman named Charlie Wilson who had an answer as to how to reverse this alarming decline in national fortunes.What follows is an incredible litany of subterfuge, misalliance, misadventure, bluff and brinkmanship, all making for one unbelievable whopper of story that would not even remotely comprehensible but for the efforts of Charlie Wilson and Gust Avrokotos. These two modern James Bond types, by bending and breaking the rules of protocol, literally turned Washington upside down in their efforts to supply the Mujahideen (an alliance of Afghan freedom fighters against the Russian occupation in the 1980s) with scads of cash and loads of firepower (rocket launchers made in the US). Both these men, one a politician, the other a career CIA operative, knew how to manipulate the system so as to divert tax dollars into slush or covert funds that could then be legitimately used for counter-intelligence projects like knocking out the Soviets in Afghanistan. The ploy was to fund and arm an insurgency in that country that would have the same debilitating effect as the NLF (backed by the Soviets) had on the Americans in Vietnam decades before. In other words, give the Russians a serious dose of their own medicine. What makes this whole affair so fascinating is that these two bounders literally did all this illicit wheeling-and-dealing through the back door of Congress while publicly bragging about it with immunity. Their secret to success consisted of being on the right side of the Reagan policy on Soviet containment, having lots of friends in high places, and being willing to push the envelope to the ultimate limit of credulity. This book is another account of how the tail wags the dog in American politics. I m still shaking my head at the thought that the ongoing turmoil in Afghanistan can be somewhat traced to the benighted efforts of these two scalawags, who, when the file was finally closed by George H. Bush in 1992, came home to a hero s welcome, american style. This study is one of the most entertaining and best-written books on the art of politics in modern warfare.
utterly amazing - If this were fiction I would have to give it three stars or less for being unbelievably over-the-top. Would you beleive that an alcoholic sex-maniac liberal Democrat Congressman illegaly ran the biggest covert program in the history of the USA without ANY kind of sanction from the Executive branch!?!Depending on your point-of-view, Rep. Wilson s endless escapades that included drunk hit-and-run car crashes and wasting endless amounts of taxpayer money on flying his many girlfriends around the world will either amuse or disgust you. Likewise the Congressman s one-man foreign policy that was entirely invented by him and approved of by no one. You will be awed by the courage of the Afghans who were literally willing to die to the last man to expell the Red Army from their land. You will also be disgusted by these same Afghans who would rape their Russian prisoners until they died and also took liberties with pack mules supplied by the CIA.In this post 9/11 world you will wonder if arming the most violent and primitive people on the face of the Earth with modern weapons and giving them a taste for taking down a superpower was a bright idea after all.
It s not the story it s the message... - Apparently many more awake than i knew the story Crile tells (in great detail) in this book of how 1) the Cold War really ended, and 2) why the Middle East is a hotbed of fundamnentalist Jihad-ism today. (Both very important topics.)as fate would have it i heard of the book because of my interest in Middle Eastern dance, more popularly known as ",belly dancing.", (Crile s descriptopns of his personal dancers performance was not one of the more credibility enhancing parts of the book-- i never heard of such behavior by any belly dancer here in California where we have a large active group engaged in promoting it as an art form and in support of peace.)But in this day and age of global terrorism, I read the book-- sometimes ponderous and overweghted with questionable details-- to get to the postscript. To see how all this led to today s envoromnent where America is hated, not loved, and we here at home are so baffled about it all.In this i was not disappointed. A must read for those seeking an explanation for this crisis of global relations and world peace.
Cowboy Geopolitics - Author George Crile has documented America s initial plunge into the cauldron of fundamentalist Islamic politics in an account that is both eye-opening and disturbing. His protagonist is a yahoo congressman from Texas who flouts both American law and Muslim culture for the purpose of killing Russians in 1980s Afghanistan. Crile suggests that the germ of Charlie Wilson s passion for this cause is a subconscious lust to avenge the sadistic killing of his boyhood dog. Crile is apparently smitten with his hero, whom he attempts to portray as a glamorous daredevil. To this reader, however, Charlie Wilson comes off as a reckless lout and bully, a truly Ugly American. Wilson s testosterone-fueled machinations pried the lid off a Pandora s box of Muslim hatred, and our grandchildren will have to live with the consequences - if we make it that far.
WOW. Simply amazing. - This story is so unbelievable that it has to be true... right?It should be called Gust s and Charlie s War, but that just wouldn t flow, now, would it?Poor Gust. I have a feeling when the movie adaptation with Tom Hanks as Charlie Wilson comes out, it will neglect Gust, just as the book s title does, when in fact Gust Avrakotos is an essential accomplice and side-kick to Charlie, his veritable consigliere, in so many ways.The book is amazing. I literally read entire chapters with my jaw nearly touching the floor and my brow furrowing up and down like a wiggling caterpillar, out of shock and disbelief.Although unfortunately I think the book has a certain indelible (but subtle) editorial bias (see chapter 23, for example, which is devoted to ",hating on", well-intentioned conservatives impeding the otherwise virtuous work of Gust and Charlie), it is not one of those ",hate/blame America first", books, not at all. In fact, because so much of the research was done in the glow of winning the Cold War, nearly everyone beams in conveying their contributions to the Afghan effort, and you can tell everyone was jockeying for their place in history. I was skeptical of the book at first, because the book was recommended so strongly by a friend who is, to put it mildly, rather much a modern-day flower child. But this book is, for its flaws, highly objective and well-researched.George Crile doesn t argue that America created bin Laden. He doesn t argue that America created the Taliban. He seems to admire Charlie s efforts. He excitedly portrays the motives and actions of an otherwise pretty dispicable sleazeball, and seems to buy Charlie Wilson s justification for his secret war. Everyone did at first, though, because it was a success. The winners get to write history. Success breeds justification and virtue. Until it turns out you didn t really win.After September 11, 2001, it appeared that America s success in Afghanistan had been short-sighted. U.S. policy there was unfinished. But that s to be expected when the policy is almost entirely covert. Some people seize on this book to prove that America should withdraw from the world, or that problems of the U.S. are entirely of its own creation, but the book doesn t really argue that, it seems. Sure, the U.S. got burned by the law of unintended consequences, but it was mostly a failure to see it through and finish the job that allowed the course of events to unfold the way they did. In a horrible irony, the book argues, because the war was so secret when it perhaps did not need to be, it gave Islamic fundamentalists false impressions about their own potency. They felt they had taken down one superpower (the Soviet Union) with Allah alone, so why not another (the U.S.)?The book is not merely about war and Afghanistan, or about the workings in Washington. It is about doing coke with naked chicks in hot tubs, a slew of emotional days and nights fueled by alcohol, lavish junkets around the world with beauty queens, near death experiences, and an array of other adventures and characters.I can t recommend it enough. It will blow you away. You ll be compelled to read more on the various people, places, and events in the book. You ll love and hate Charlie Wilson all at once. You ll feel upset and troubled by a rogue few who could do so much, at the same time, you may feel a little national pride. ",Hey, we re not pushovers. We can get down and dirty.", And, we have people who are willing to lie, cheat, steal, beg, schmooze, lobby, and even dance with the devil, all in our ",best interests", (whatever those may be), without some of our greatest strengths (our free and open society, free media, accountability to rule of law) putting us in shackles, making us impotent to threats in the world.Like I said, it is disturbing, but oddly comforting all at once. Unless you read this book, you ll probably have no idea what I am talking about. This is one of those books you ll stay up to 2 AM finishing.