The American Empire’s History of Amnesia!

TRUMP’S ‘INCOHERENCE’ ON SOVIET INVASION AND . . .

by Selvam Canagaratna-March 16, 2019, 7:17 pm 

"Not the power to remember, but its very opposite, the power to forget, is a necessary condition for our existence."

– Sholem Asch, The Nazarene, 1939.

As he approaches 75, Tom Engelhardt, the creator of the highly respected website, Tomdispatch.com, believes his brain is, as he puts it, "beginning to dump previously secure memories", but soon realised "that such loss also involved gain", in that it made him "something of an instant expert on one aspect of 21st-century America: the memory hole that’s swallowed up parts of our all-too-recent history.

"I’ve been wondering whether aging imperial powers, like old men and women, have a tendency to discard what once had been oh-so-familiar. There’s a difference, though, when it comes to the elites of the aging empire I live in at least. They don’t just dump things relatively randomly as I seem to be doing. Instead, they conveniently obliterate all memory of their country’s – that is, their own – follies and misdeeds.

"Let me give you an example. But you need to bear with me here because I’m about to jump into the disordered mind of a man who, though two years younger than me, has what might be called – given present-day controversies – a borderline personality. I’m thinking of President Donald Trump, or rather of a particular moment in his chaotic recent mental life.

"As the New Year dawned, he chaired what now passes for a ‘cabinet meeting᾿. That mainly means an event in which those present grovel before, fawn over, and outrageously praise him in front of the cameras.

"I’m about to plunge into history and our President is neither a historian, nor particularly coherent. Fortunately, he’s surrounded by a bevy of translators (still called "reporters" or "pundits") and we have their notes. So here, as a start, is a much-quoted passage of his on this country’s never-ending Afghan War from that cabinet meeting (including all the ‘original᾿ incoherence):

"We’re going to do something that’s right. We are talking to the Taliban. We’re talking to a lot of different people. But here’s the thing – because mentioned India: India is there. Russia is there. Russia used to be the Soviet Union. Afghanistan made it Russia, because they went bankrupt fighting in Afghanistan. Russia. So you take a look at other countries. Pakistan is there; they should be fighting. But Russia should be fighting.

"The reason Russia was in Afghanistan was because terrorists were going into Russia. They were right to be there. The problem is it was a tough fight. And literally, they went bankrupt. They went into being called Russia again, as opposed to the Soviet Union. You know, a lot [of] these places you’re reading about now are no longer a part of Russia because of Afghanistan."

The overlap between the fall of the Soviet Union and its foray into Afghanistan is obvious, notes Engelhardt. The USSR invaded in 1979 and left a decade later, in 1989. The superpower dissolved shortly thereafter in 1991. But correlation is not causation. . . It was perhaps among the many reasons the USSR collapsed. But it was not the reason.

"I was left alone, still dredging through my memories of that ancient conflict, which, these days, no one but the President would even think of bringing up in the context of the ongoing US war in Afghanistan. And yet here’s the curious thing when it comes to an aging empire that prefers not to remember the history of its folly: Donald Trump was right that Russia’s Afghan misadventure is a remarkably logical place to start when considering the present American debacle in that same country.

"Let me mention one thing no one’s likely to emphasize these days when it comes to the Russian decision to enter that Afghan quagmire in 1979. At the highest levels of the Carter and then the Reagan administrations, top American officials were working assiduously to embroil the Soviets in Afghanistan and would then invest staggering sums in a CIA campaign to fund Islamic extremist guerrillas to keep them there. [Not that anyone in Washington is likely to play this up in 2019, but the United States began aiding those Mujahidin guerrillas not after the Red Army moved in to support a pro-Soviet regime in Kabul, but six months before.]

"Here’s how President Carter’s National Security Advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski, described the situation almost two decades later:

According to the official version of history, CIA aid to the mujahidin began during 1980, that’s to say, after the Soviet army invaded Afghanistan. But the reality, kept secret until now, is completely different: on 3 July 1979 President Carter signed the first directive for secret aid to the opponents of the pro-Soviet regime in Kabul. And on the same day, I wrote a note to the President in which I explained that in my opinion this aid would lead to a Soviet military intervention.

And asked if he had any regrets, Brzezinski responded: "Regret what? The secret operation was an excellent idea. It drew the Russians into the Afghan trap and you want me to regret it? On the day that the Soviets officially crossed the border, I wrote to President Carter, saying, in essence: ‘We now have the opportunity of giving to the USSR its Vietnam War.’

Think about that largely missing bit of history for a moment, wrote Engelhardt. Top US officials wanted to give the Soviet Union a version of their own disastrous Vietnam experience and so invested billions of dollars and much effort in that proxy war – and it worked. The Soviet leadership continued to pour money into their military misadventure in Afghanistan when their country was already going bankrupt and the society they had built was beginning to collapse around them. They were indeed suffering from what General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev came to call ‘the bleeding wound᾿. And if that isn’t the language of disaster (or bankruptcy or, perhaps more accurately, implosion), what is? Yes, Afghanistan, that "," wasn’t the only thing that took their world down, but the way their much-vaunted army finally limped home a decade later was certainly a significant factor in its collapse.

Now, let me tax your memory (and especially elite Washington’s) just a bit more, wrote Tom. Think again about the history that led up to the American war President Trump was fretting about in that cabinet meeting. Under the circumstances, it wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that Brzezinski and his successors were just a tad too successful – or, to put it another way, that they lured not one but two empires into their trap; the second being, of course, the American one.

After all, in that 10-year Afghan proxy war (1979–89), they laid the foundations for the creation by a rich young Saudi named Osama bin Laden of a resistance outfit of Arab fighters. You know, Al Qaeda, or ‘the baseʼ.

In other words, Brzezinski & Co. laid the foundations for what would become a nearly 30-year American quagmire war (with a decade off between its two parts) in a land that, in 1979, few Americans other than a bunch of hippies had ever heard of. Here, then, is a small hint for the President: You might consider starting to refer to Afghanistan – and I assure you this would be historically accurate (even if you were roundly criticized for it by the Washington punditariat) – as America’s "bleeding wound."

"In a country in which implosive elements are already being mixed into its politics, President Trump had his finger on something when he brought up the Russian war in Afghanistan," wrote Engelhardt. "However historically and syntactically mixed up he might have been, his brain was still far more on target than those of most of the wise men and women of the present Washington establishment."*