Recently in The Cold War Category
"I didn't know what the guy said, but I saw his sole." Say what you will about the 43rd president -- and, no doubt, the history books will -- the man has cat-like reflexes for his age. The story of the weekend was, of course, the shoe incident in Baghdad, which ended up clearly overshadowing Dubya's remarks and reason for his visit -- the signing of a Status of Forces agreement -- and serving as an exclamation point of sorts for the president's, shall we say, fraught relationship with the nation and people of Iraq. I have to give him credit, tho' -- Bush not only handled the incident with agility, aplomb and a surprising amount of sang-froid, but generally struck the right tone about it afterward. "Okay, everybody calm down for a minute. First of all thank you for apologizing on behalf of the Iraqi people. It doesn't bother me. And if you want some -- if you want the facts, it's a size 10 shoe that he threw. (Laughter.) Thank you for your concern, do not worry about it."
In the wake of the biggest shoe-related world incident since Nikita Khrushchev (or perhaps Richard Reid), there's been some discussion of late about the legitimacy of shoe-throwing as a form of political protest. (Throwing shoes into machines, a.k.a. "sabot-age," is already generally considered a no-no.) It's not hard to understand, or even empathize with, the anger that drove Muntadar al-Zaidi to this act of protest. Here's a journalist who's been covering airstrikes and Abu Ghraib, who has seen the "collateral damage" of this war-of-choice firsthand, and who himself was briefly arrested by American security forces at one point. That being said, to my mind, any attempted act of physical violence against the president -- even something as seemingly innocuous as shoe-throwing -- cannot be countenanced. Now, I'm not saying the guy needs to rot in jail for the rest of his life -- far from it -- but let's not start pretending that that this form of protest is "ok." It's not. End of story.
Plus, keep in mind that a horrible situation was averted by Bush here just by his underreacting estimably to the incident. I don't think it's a stretch to think that al-Zaidi may have put his life in danger by making a threatening lunge at the president. The Secret Service are -- and have to be -- a hair-trigger bunch. Ok, al-Zaidi was only armed with a shoe...anybody ever heard of Amadou Diallo? All too often, tragedy results from a simple misunderstanding of intentions. Mr. al-Zaidi made his point, no doubt...but it was still a stupid and dangerous stunt, by any reckoning.
And besides, It's all fun and games until somebody loses an eye.
At one point in Mike Nichols' smart, surprisingly enjoyable Charlie Wilson's War, the freewheeling, fun-loving Representative Charles Wilson (Tom Hanks), he of the Texas 2nd Congressional District, tells his schlubby, foul-mouthed partner at the CIA, Gust Avrakotos (Philip Seymour Hoffman), "You ain't James Bond." Deadpans Avrakotos, "You ain't Thomas Jefferson, so let's call it even." True, Bond and Jefferson they're not, but that's actually part of the appeal of Nichols' lively little film. A strangely optimistic, almost Capraesque movie about the covert proxy war in Afghanistan (and, ultimately, the inadvertent role played by the U.S. in fostering the Taliban), Charlie Wilson's War -- adapted by The West Wing's Aaron Sorkin from the book by the late George Crile -- is no grim, sober-minded edutainment. Moving at a brisk clip and maintaining a light touch -- too light, some might argue -- throughout, the movie instead depicts how a few (relatively) ordinary, committed people can change the world...provided one of them is sitting on the House Defense Subcommittee, and has stacked up a sizable amount of chits.
When -- after a quick flash-forward setup -- we first meet Congressman Charlie Wilson (Tom Hanks, eschewing the Pvt. Ryan earnestness for his more sardonic Bachelor Party/Volunteers side), he's lounging in a Vegas hot tub with a coke-snorting television producer, a Playboy bunny, and two strippers. In short, he seems like a out-and-out cad. But there's something endearing and even statesmanlike about his piqued interest in a 60 Minutes report, playing in the corner, on the mujahideen in Afghanistan. (Maybe it's the Dan Rather Texas connection.) Delving further into the issue back in Washington, Wilson -- exercising the power of his crucial committee position -- singlehandedly doubles U.S. funding of the mujahideen from $5 million to $10 million. This by-all-accounts token gesture draws the attention of the wealthy Houston socialite Joanne Herring (Julia Roberts, solid), a woman with money, connections, and a fervent commitment to anticommunism, and she sends Wilson off to Pakistan to meet with President Zia-ul-Haq about the situation in neighboring Afghanistan. There, Wilson is moved to the cause by the sight of a dismal refugee camp, and soon enough, he's enlisted an important ally in Avrakotos, a profane Langley veteran (Hoffman, showing yet another side after Before the Devil and The Savages this year, and nearly running away with the movie.) Together, these three -- Wilson, Herring, Avrakotos (John Rambo's unique contributions to the cause of Afghan freedom are sadly overlooked -- set in motion a scheme not only to increase funding radically for the war but to funnel Soviet weaponry owned by Israel and Egypt to the freedom fighters there. Of course, some delicate diplomacy is required, and, in any case, giving Afghan youths an arsenal of helicopter-slaying RPGs doesn't seem like such a great an idea in retrospect...
While nodding to the dismal events that follow American intervention in the region, Charlie Wilson's War hardly dwells on the blowback, or on anything -- a few refugee camp horror stories and a Pavel Lychnikoff cameo notwithstanding -- that might interrupt its tone of hearty, back-slapping jocularity. (Supporting turns by Amy Adams, Emily Blunt, Ned Beatty, Denis O'Hare, John Slattery, and Peter Gerety help speed things along in a comfortable groove.) And yet, however feel-good, Wilson ultimately feels more ripped from the headlines than even the filmmakers could've guessed. Some lawmakers have trouble distinguishing between Pakistan and Afghanistan at one point, and Herring begins an introduction of Pakistan's President by saying, "Zia did not kill Bhutto." (Leavening the chill that follows this now-eerie moment, Rudy Giuliani and John Murtha also come up at various times as punchlines.)
But, its timeliness and prescience aside, what I found most impressive about Charlie Wilson's War is how aptly it portrays the feel of Washington. This was somewhat surprising to me as, while I liked Sorkin's The West Wing decently enough as a TV drama and admired its general idealism about politics, the show always felt rather fake to me. But, be it due to Crile or Sorkin or Nichols, Wilson conveys a lot of the telling details of life inside the Beltway quite well -- the hallway horse-trading and neverending quid pro quos, the simultaneous meetings, the bland, institutional cafeterias; the bevy of youngish staffers (and inordinately pretty administrative assistants) on Capitol Hill, the deals crafted over dinner or drinks, the conference calls, the memory holes, myopic thinking, and CYA behavior. Outside of The Wire's nuanced take on the compromises of Baltimore city politics, it's hard to think of a more on-target recent portrayal of the (non-campaigning) political process. Sadly, for Congressman Wilson as for today's legislators, fiddling with the internal dynamics of far-flung nations we barely understand for short-term gain is All in the Game. Still, as Charlie Wilson's War proves, don't let it ever be said that nothing gets done in Washington.
Robert De Niro's The Good Shepherd, the first entrant in my ongoing end-of-2006 movie marathon this week, makes no secret of its Oscar-bait aspirations. Basically the WASP version of The Godfather, as told against the creation and Cold War consolidation of the CIA, Shepherd boasts a crisp look, a grand historical sweep, high-quality production values, and a stellar cast (including Best Supporting Actor-type turns strewn all over the place, like the wreckage from a better, more interesting movie.) But it's also a film that never lets you forget how serious and sober-minded it aims to be. As such -- however well-meaning and nice to look at, with all its chiaroscuro fedoras on hand -- it's also sadly a bit of a bore. Throw in an occasionally clunky script (note the particularly egregious God/CIA line near the end, for example) and some considerable miscasting issues (Matt Damon is a good actor, but is thoroughly implausible as a middle-aged man, and Angelina Jolie is too much of a star presence to be wholly believable as the ignored wife) and you have a respectable but ultimately somewhat pedestrian night at the movies. Shepherd gets the job done, I suppose, but it takes no pleasure in it.
When we first meet intelligence analyst Edward Wilson (Matt Damon), the bespectacled Everyman and titular shepherd of the film, it's the spring of 1961, the Bay of Pigs invasion has just gone FUBAR, and America's new president is looking for a few heads to roll over at Langley. In this middle of this spate of job anxiety, Wilson is mysteriously sent a photo and audioreel of a couple in the throes of passion, seemingly somewhere in the Third World. As he sets to work on deciphering this arcane message, Wilson's thoughts wander all the way back to 1939, when he -- a young, idealistic student of poetry at Yale -- was recruited first by the infamous Order of Skull and Bones (a.k.a. preppy fratboys gone wild) and then, after war breaks out in Europe, by the OSS. Along the way, he takes on a number of varied mentors, ranging from a Nazi-sympathizing poetry professor with then-shocking proclivities (Michael Gambon) to a congenial if hobbled general and spymaster (De Niro, playing a variation on Wild Bill Donovan) to a gaggle of fellow scions of the WASP Old Boy Network (representing the Eli's, William Hurt and Lee Pace; representing the Oxford-Cambridge crowd, Billy Crudup with a slipping accent.) He also falls in love, with a (note the symbolism!) kindly, open-hearted deaf co-ed (Tammy Blanchard), and falls, in lust, with a needy, easy, and borderline-psycho socialite (Angelina Jolie, verging on typecasting in a terribly written role, but still quite good.) As the years drag on and the world freezes into Cold War, Wilson finds himself not only engaged in high-stakes cloak-and-dagger gamesmanship against his Soviet counterpart, codenamed Ulysses (Oleg Stefan), but inexorably ceding more of his dreams, his morality, his family, and his very soul to that hungering bastion of the Eastern Establishment mafia, the Central Intelligence Agency. And every time he tries to get out, they keep pulling him back in...
Comparisons to The Godfather are probably as unfair as they are inescapable. Still, for all the striving and sweating on display here, Edward Wilson is ultimately no Michael Corleone. In fact, Damon, while trying admirably, can't plausibly sustain the second "middle-aged" half of the film, and portrays Wilson as too much of a blank (clearly De Niro's decision) to garner much in the way of sympathy or empathy. More resonant in The Good Shepherd are many of the supporting turns, particularly Gambon, John Turturro as Wilson's tough-talking (non-WASP) #2, and Alec Baldwin in a minor role as a hard-living G-man. But they're not enough to put Shepherd over the top, and for every vignette in the film that contains real emotional power -- most notably the interrogation of defector "Valentin Mironov" (Mark Ivanir) -- there are two that, through a combination of directorial straining and an overly intrusive score, spill over into overcooked blandness. (See for example, the plane and letter-burning sequences at the end of the film, both of which are carried for several beats too long and which suffer from paint-by-numbers swelling strings on the soundtrack.) The Good Shepherd is by no means a bad film, but, alas, it's not particularly a good one either. Like a veteran CIA hand, it fades effortlessly into the background, and offers little that might be considered truly memorable.
The buck stops here? Not hardly. Grasping for historical validation wherever he can find it, Dubya has apparently begun to fancy himself a modern-day Truman. "James G. Hershberg, a Cold War historian at George Washington University, said he doubts that history will judge Bush as kindly as it has Truman, saying Truman's roles in fostering European recovery and building the NATO alliance were seen as solid accomplishments at the time. 'Bush, by contrast, lacks any successes of comparable magnitude to compensate for his mismanagement of the Iraq war and will be hard-pressed to produce any in his last two years'."
"As [Harry] Truman said, 'We must, once and for all, prove by our acts conclusively that right has might.' That's why this country has historically been in the vanguard of the global human rights movement. But that lead can only be maintained if America remains true to its principles, including in the struggle against terrorism. When it appears to abandon its own ideas and objectives, its friends abroad are naturally troubled and confused." As Kofi Annan bids farewell to his post at the UN, he offers some words of wisdom to America -- and to Dubya -- on our nation's role in the world.
"The position of secretary of state is potentially the most fulfilling in the government short of the presidency. Its scope is global; ultimately it rests on almost philosophical assumptions as to the nature of world order and the relationship of order to progress and national interest." In this past Sunday's NYT Book Review, Henry Kissinger remembers his predecessor, Dean Acheson. "Acheson dealt with the issues Nixon put before him thoughtfully, precisely, without any attempt at flattery, in pursuit of his conception of national service and, unlike some other outside advisers, without offering advice that had not been solicited."
"The idea that Truman and Dean Acheson could be hauled out as exhibits for preventive war in Iraq against 'abject pacifists' such as myself made me feel that I was living in Oceania, and the Ministry of Peace had rewritten the textbooks to prove that the legacy of a president who rejected preventive war in fact constituted the best justification for it!" By way of my friend Mark, Peter Beinart and Michael Tomasky go toe-to-toe over the legacy of '48 at Slate's Book Club. I'm inclined to agree with the latter.
"The CIA based its decisions about using former SS men or unreconstructed Nazis solely on operational considerations...Hiring these tainted individuals brought little other than operational problems and moral confusion to our government's intelligence community." New documents unearthed by UVa historian Timothy Naftali make clear the Cold War-era CIA had no qualms about using former Nazi assets, and even neglected to flush out infamous war criminal Adolf Eichmann from his hiding place in Argentina after being tipped off about his location. For shame.
As seen on Medley's Furl, Columbia PhD, Rutgers professor, and Slate "History Lesson" columnist David Greenberg reexamines the current divide between liberal internationalists and anti-imperialists among the Dems -- and seems to think more of Peter Beinart's recent "Cold War Liberal" argument and the protective camouflage DLC-types than I do -- in the Boston Globe.
"[F]or all their practical failures, conservatives have at least told a coherent political story, with deep historical roots, about what keeps America safe and what makes it great. Liberals, by contrast, have offered adjectives drawn from focus groups and policy proposals linked by no larger theme." In keeping with the intellectual territory he staked out after the 2004 election, former TNR editor Peter Beinart makes the case for a return to Cold War liberalism in a NYT excerpt of his new book, The Good Fight (also discussed in the recent Atlantic Monthly.)
I couldn't agree more with Beinart's paragraph above, but I don't think the lack of a sufficiently robust national security emphasis is really the defining element missing among today's Dems. Are there really Democrats out there who don't agree with Beinart's three main assessments here, that (a) America faces a real enemy in Al Qaeda and other fundamentalist terror networks, (b) our foreign policy should be less hubristic and more attuned to both local contingency and international institutions, and (c) our national sense of self should emphasize our own fallibility at times? Beinart would probably target the MoveOn crowd, but as Eric Alterman noted in the last round of this back-and-forth, that's just a DLC straw man, roughly akin to Joe Klein's cadre of phantom lefty consultants in the last update.
Plus, I think there are two significant historical problems with the Cold War liberalism Beinart unreservedly espouses, which he fails to discuss here. For one, Cold War liberals could very easily be seen as best inattentive to and -- at worst complicit in -- the excesses of McCarthyism. If the enemy abroad becomes the central defining focus of your national narrative, then the enemy within is undoubtedly going to start eating at you as well. For another, (and as John Gaddis, among others, has pointed out) -- for all its early sense of diplomatic complexity and limited, realistic goals -- the Cold War liberalism Beinart promotes all too readily (d)evolved into the guiding rationale for wildly wrongheaded foreign policy interventions, most notably in Vietnam. (You'd think Beinart would pay more lip service to this issue, particularly as he himself made much the same mistake in shilling for the Iraq war in The New Republic.)
In short, I agree with Beinart's assessment that the Dems lack a sense of usable past, but the problems with his argument can be encapsulated by his ideal of a what a good, hawkish, Cold War liberal Democrat should look like these days: That, if Beinart's tenure at TNR is any indication, would be Joe Lieberman, a politician who's not only been flagrantly cheerleading for the administration during the current war, but has exhibited little interest in today's wartime civil liberties issues. Simply put, Joe Lieberman would hardly be my choice of template for the Democratic party. (Who would? That's easy: Russ Feingold, who's displayed a strong commitment to preserving both national security and civil liberties at home, while arguing for a more level-headed, less-in-your-face American foreign policy.)
"In short, more than one of every three documents removed from the open shelves and barred to researchers should not have been tampered with." A recently-completed audit into the formerly secret Archives reclassification program finds that many more files were reclassified -- and reclassified wrongly -- than previously suggested. "In February, the Archives estimated that about 9,500 records totaling more than 55,000 pages had been withdrawn and reclassified since 1999. The new audit shows the real haul was much larger -- at least 25,515 records were removed by five different agencies, including the CIA, Air Force, Department of Energy, the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the Archives."
"The stuff they pulled should never have been removed...Some of it is mundane, and some of it is outright ridiculous." As recently uncovered by intelligence historian Matthew Aid, the National Archives has been re-classifying thousands of once publicly available documents at the behest of unknown (re: still-classified) government agencies since 1999. "While some of the choices made by the security reviewers at the archives are baffling, others seem guided by an old bureaucratic reflex: to cover up embarrassments, even if they occurred a half-century ago. One reclassified document in Mr. Aid's files, for instance, gives the C.I.A.'s assessment on Oct. 12, 1950, that Chinese intervention in the Korean War was 'not probable in 1950.' Just two weeks later, on Oct. 27, some 300,000 Chinese troops crossed into Korea." Aid posted his account of the sordid tale today at the National Security Archive.
