Hokay, I commented earlier on the near-total post 9-11 silence regarding Brzezinski's fondly-remembered role in creating the monsters we are currently annihilating, but I was only guessing that there was no coverage.
So I just did a Lexis-Nexis search of major newspaper stories on Afghanistan where Brzezinski was mentioned anywhere in the article. Several mentioned his or the Carter administration's backing of Mujahadeen but left out crucial details, essentially getting the story exactly wrong. For example, at least one story regurgitated the old theory that B. himself debunked, namely that we began support after the Soviet invasion. You might say that at least these stories discuss our role in creating bin Laden, but we are talking about a couple of stories out of many thousands, and not in the NYT but in papers like the The Seattle Times and St. Louis Post-Dispatch. Not too impressive.
Two-- count 'em-- two stories fully recalled Brzezinski's startling historical revision. One was in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette (September 23, 2001, p. A12) and was highly critical of US policy. The other appeared in The Baltimore Sun (Dec 9, 2001, p. 1F) and was highly critical also-- of the Afghans, for their "widespread tendency... to blame everyone else, except their fellow countrymen, for the problems of two decades."
quote:
President Jimmy Carter's national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski still boasts about how U.S. covert action helped prompt the Soviet Union's 1979 invasion of Afghanistan. The United States and Saudi Arabia then financed years of armed resistance, but after the Soviets withdrew, the United States tended to look the other way while the victorious mujahedeen factions fought it out among themselves, reducing much of Kabul to dust.
I've learned that on the rare occasions when an uncomfortable, largely suppressed fact is admitted in a mainstream newspaper, it is almost always followed by a "but." I would be rich if I could find anyone sucker enough to take a bet on it. Anyway, right on cue:
quote:
Yet, no matter who has pulled the strings, Afghans themselves are responsible for most of the mischief from 1990 onward. And until Afghans own up to their role in this national tragedy, they'll be more prone than ever to keep repeating their well-armed errors.
"There is a sort of disconnect in terms of anyone saying, 'Well, we've done this to ourselves,'" says Larry Goodson, an authority on Afghanistan and a professor of international relations at Bentley College in Massachusetts. "There is a tendency to see all of this as something that the outside world has done."
So we goad the Russians (now our allies) into largely destroying the country; we create a fanatical army, which after the war proceeds to destroy the rest of the country while we look on. And the main moral failing here belongs to the Afghans, for not realizing that they did it all to themselves. Remarkable.
This is why the uncomfortable facts are usually simply avoided. The party line just looks too ridiculous in view of them.
Brzezinski was interviewed in several stories and even wrote a few high-profile editorials himself on the subject of Afghanistan, but he didn't seem too eager to recall his 1998 boast that he got Afghan Islamism rolling. I wonder why.
Foreign newspapers had no trouble remembering Brzezinski's boasts and seeing the connection to 9-11.
Several stories in The Irish Times, The Guardian, The Independent, and, for some reason, The Straits Times (Singapore) make the point rather strongly.
It's quite a comment on our liberal, free press when it is outperformed by Singapore's.
I went back to 1998 and found that not one, single, mainstream American newspaper as much as mentioned Brzezinski's comments about Afghanistan. Not one.
A search for "Lewinsky," however, aborted because it would return over 1,000 stories.