If
the paeans to McCain by diverse political climbers seems detached
from reality, it’s because they reflect the elite view of U.S.
military interventions as a chess game, with the millions killed by
unprovoked aggression mere statistics.
by
Max Blumenthal
Part
1
As the
Cold War entered its final act in 1985, journalist Helena Cobban
participated in an academic conference at an upscale resort near
Tucson, Arizona, on U.S.-Soviet interactions in the Middle East. When
she attended what was listed as the “Gala Dinner with keynote
speech”, she quickly learned that the virtual theme of the evening
was, “Adopt a Muj.”
“I
remember mingling with all of these wealthy Republican women from the
Phoenix suburbs and being asked, ‘Have you adopted a muj?” Cobban
told me. “Each one had pledged money to sponsor a member of the
Afghan mujahedin in the name of beating the communists. Some were
even seated at the event next to their personal ‘muj.’”
The
keynote speaker of the evening, according to Cobban, was a
hard-charging freshman member of Congress named John McCain.
During
the Vietnam war, McCain had been captured by the North Vietnamese
Army after being shot down on his way to bomb a civilian lightbulb
factory. He spent two years in solitary confinement and underwent
torture that left him with crippling injuries. McCain returned from
the war with a deep, abiding loathing of his former captors,
remarking as late as 2000, “I hate the gooks. I will hate them as
long as I live.” After he was criticized for the racist remark,
McCain refused to apologize. “I was referring to my prison guards,”
he said, “and I will continue to refer to them in language that
might offend some people because of the beating and torture of my
friends.”
McCain’s
visceral resentment informed his vocal support for the mujahedin as
well as the right-wing contra death squads in Central America — any
proxy group sworn to the destruction of communist governments.
So
committed was McCain to the anti-communist cause that in the
mid-1980s he had joined the advisory board of the United States
Council for World Freedom, the American affiliate of the World
Anti-Communist League (WACL). Geoffrey Stewart-Smith, a former leader
of WACL’s British chapter who had turned against the group in 1974,
described the organization as “a collection of Nazis, fascists,
anti-Semites, sellers of forgeries, vicious racialists, and corrupt
self-seekers. It has evolved into an anti-Semitic international.”
Joining
McCain in the organization were notables such as Jaroslav Stetsko,
the Croatian Nazi collaborator who helped oversee the extermination
of 7,000 Jews in 1941; the brutal Argentinian former dictator Jorge
Rafael Videla; and Guatemalan death squad leader Mario Sandoval
Alarcon. Then-President Ronald Reagan honored the group for playing
“a leadership role in drawing attention to the gallant struggle now
being waged by the true freedom fighters of our day.”
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