by Oliver Stone
Brzezinski saw more opportunity than danger in the growing Islamic fundamentalism. For several years, the United States had been working with Iranian and Pakistani intelligence to develop a right-wing Islamic fundamentalist movement within Pakistan that would challenge governments sympathetic to the Soviet Union. Brzezinski later acknowledged that the United States had been supporting the mujahideen even before the Soviet invasion: “It was July 3, 1979, that President Carter signed the first directive for secret aid to the opponents of the pro-Soviet regime in Kabul. And that very day I wrote a note to the president in which I explained to him that in my opinion this aid was going to induce a Soviet military intervention.”61
Brzezinski understood the Soviets’ fear that the Afghan insurgency would spark an uprising by the 40 million Muslims in Soviet Central Asia. Afghan leaders had been pressing Moscow to send troops to quell the uprising and the Russians rebuffed their requests. Brezhnev instead urged them to ease repression of political opponents. Soviet leaders concluded correctly that the Americans were instigating the insurgency in cooperation with extremist elements in Iran and Pakistan. They figured that China might also be playing a role. But they still hesitated to intervene. Gromyko summed up their concerns: “We would be largely throwing away everything we achieved with such difficulty, particularly détente, the SALT-II negotiations would fly by the wayside, there would be no signing of an agreement (and however you look at it that is for us the greatest political priority), there would be no meeting of [Brezhnev] with Carter, . . . and our relations with Western countries, particularly the FRG, would be spoiled.”62
The Soviets opted to oust Amin, the driving force behind the repression, and replace him with Taraki. But the plan backfired, leaving Taraki dead and Amin more firmly entrenched in power. Not only did Amin then widen the repression, he also reached out to the United States for help. Dreading the thought of a pro-American regime on their southern border, replete with U.S. troops and Pershing II missiles, Soviet leaders decided to replace Amin with Babrak Karmal, despite knowing that the resulting instability might require them to send troops into the country. Military leaders opposed intervention, fearing that it would incite a unified Muslim response that would bog them down for years in a place they had no business being in. But Brezhnev foolishly insisted the war would be over in three to four weeks. His decision to send troops was made easier by the fact that détente with the West had already begun to unravel with growing U.S. opposition to ratifying SALT II and NATO’s decision to deploy new intermediate-range ballistic missiles in Europe. Still, as historian Melvyn Leffler reminded readers, “When they made their decision to intervene in Afghanistan, Soviet leaders saw threat, not opportunity.”63
Defying his wary military advisors, Brezhnev deployed over 100,000 Soviet troops on Christmas Day 1979. Up to the very eve of the invasion, the CIA kept assuring Carter that no such action was forthcoming. The world scoffed at the Soviet claim that it was defending against covert U.S. efforts to destabilize a government friendly to Moscow on the Soviet Union’s border. Brzezinski cheered the invasion, believing he had lured Moscow into its own Vietnam trap.
In full Cold War mode by that point, Carter called the invasion of Afghanistan “the greatest threat to peace since the Second World War”—a statement so hyperbolic that New York Times columnist Russell Baker felt compelled to remind him of the Berlin blockade, the Korean War, the Suez crisis, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and the war in Vietnam.64 In his January 23, 1980, State of the Union address, Carter declared:
The region which is now threatened by Soviet troops in Afghanistan is of great strategic importance: It contains more than two-thirds of the world’s exportable oil. The Soviet effort to dominate Afghanistan has brought Soviet military forces to within 300 miles of the Indian Ocean and close to the Straits of Hormuz, a waterway through which most of the world’s oil must flow. The Soviet Union is now attempting to consolidate a strategic position, therefore, that poses a grave threat to the free movement of Middle East oil. . . .
Let our position be absolutely clear: An attempt by any outside force to gain control of the Persian Gulf region will be regarded as an assault on the vital interests of the United States of America, and such an assault will be repelled by any means necessary, including military force.65
The final sentence, which became enshrined as the Carter Doctrine, was interpreted in the Kremlin as a clear threat of war—even nuclear war. Vance attempted to remove it from the address, striking it from the draft that the State Department submitted to the White House. Brzezinski fought to keep it in, convincing Press Secretary Jody Powell that without it the speech was devoid of content. Powell persuaded Carter that his national security advisor was right.66
Zbigniew Brzezinski with Pakistani soldiers in March 1980. Although Carter had cut off aid to Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq’s repressive government in 1977 because of Zia’s contempt for human rights and his nuclear weapons program, the United States now offered Pakistan millions of dollars in military and economic aid in return for supporting Islamic insurgents fighting Soviet intervention in Afghanistan. Brzezinski traveled to Pakistan and Saudi Arabia to work out financial and military collaboration.
Interviewed the following month on NBC News, Assistant Secretary of State William Dyess reiterated the threat, pointing out that “the Soviets know that this terrible weapon has been dropped on human beings twice in history and it was an American president who dropped it both times.”67
The Soviets thought that U.S. accusations of Soviet aggression in the Middle East were preposterous, yet Carter withdrew the U.S. ambassador from Moscow and took SALT II off the table. He cut trade between the two countries, banned U.S. athletes from participating in the upcoming Moscow Olympics, increased defense spending, and sent Secretary of Defense Harold Brown to China to sound out Chinese leaders about establishing military ties.
As many of Brezhnev’s advisors had warned, the Soviet intervention did spark a much larger uprising on the part of Islamists both inside and outside Afghanistan. Resistance groups based in Peshawar, Pakistan, joined with madrassa-trained Islamic zealots from Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Pakistan to aid the Afghan resistance fighters. In Islamabad, thirty-five Muslim nations condemned the Soviet aggression. Brzezinski began looking for ways to fan the flames of potential discontent among Muslims in Soviet Central Asia. In earlier decades, the United States had employed Islamic fundamentalism as a weapon in the fight against secular Arab nationalism. It would now use Islamic extremism against the Soviet Union. But that meant cooperating with Pakistan’s president, General Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq. Carter had cut off aid to his repressive government in 1977 because of Zia’s contempt for human rights and his nuclear weapons program. Now, within days of the invasion, Carter offered Zia hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of military and economic aid in return for supporting the Islamist insurgents. In February 1980, Brzezinski traveled to Pakistan and Saudi Arabia to work out financial and military collaboration. Saudi Prince Turki al-Faisal told a CIA officer, “We don’t do operations. We don’t know how. All we know how to do is write checks.” The Saudis agreed to match the U.S. contributions.68
Despite Carter’s saber rattling, the United States would not have been able to repel a Soviet invasion of the Gulf, short of beginning a nuclear war. Carter therefore took measures to rectify that situation. He built up a rapid deployment force with new bases in Somalia, Kenya, and Oman from which several thousand U.S. troops could be quickly deployed to the Gulf in a crisis. He strengthened ties with friendly governments in the region, such as Saudi Arabia. And he made a major adjustment in nuclear strategy, issuing Presidential Directive 59, which changed the U.S. nuclear war-fighting strategy from fighting wars of mutually assured destruction to fighting “flexible” and “limited” nuclear wars that the United States could win. Not only did Carter’s effort to eliminate nuclear weapons fall flat, PD-59 initiated a massive increase in conventional and nuclear arms. Under it, the United States prepared
to fight a protracted nuclear war, first targeting Soviet leaders, while holding attacks on cities in abeyance.
Thus were dashed, once and for all, the hopes that Carter embodied for a safer and more peaceful world. During his one term in office, he managed to support research on the neutron bomb, authorize deployment of nuclear-armed cruise missiles to Europe, commission the first Trident submarine, and double the number of warheads aimed at the Soviet Union. Thus, despite having Carter in the White House, the CPD’s campaign to defeat SALT II and increase defense spending had succeeded beyond its wildest dreams. In fact, by the end of his term, Carter had done a complete about-face and bought the CPD’s view of an aggressive Soviet Union that had to be contained. Détente was dead. Carter even repudiated his earlier criticism of the Vietnam War. Vietnam veterans had long since become freedom fighters who “went to Vietnam without any desire to capture territory or to impose American will on other people.”69 Despite his best intentions, he had laid the groundwork for the extreme views that Reagan would bring to the White House. As Anne Cahn summarized in her book Killing Détente:
By the 1980 presidential election, the choice in foreign and defense policy was between that of the Carter administration, which favored the MX missile, the Trident submarine, a Rapid Deployment Force, a “stealth” bomber, cruise missiles, counterforce targeting leading to a first-strike capability, and a 5 percent increase in defense spending, and that of the Republicans under Ronald Reagan, who favored all of these plus the neutron bomb, antiballistic missiles, the B-1 bomber, civil defense, and an 8 percent increase in defense spending.70
Not only did Carter not fulfill his promise to sharply reduce defense spending, he significantly increased it, from $115.2 billion in his first budget to $180 billion in his final one.71 Nor was he apologetic about this reversal. During his reelection campaign, he even got into a proxy war with the Republicans over the issue. Appearing on the Today show in early July, Defense Secretary Harold Brown attacked the Republicans for cutting defense spending by more than 35 percent between 1969 and 1976, whereas the Carter administration had raised it by 10 percent during its time in office and planned to raise it an additional 25 percent during its second term. Former Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird challenged Brown’s math but admitted that defense spending had gone up faster under Carter than under Nixon or Ford.72
From the Soviet vantage point, U.S. behavior was quite alarming. As future CIA director Robert Gates later admitted, “the Soviets saw a very different Jimmy Carter than did most Americans by 1980, different and more hostile and threatening.”73 At that point, Soviet leaders didn’t know what to expect from Carter. In late 1979 and early 1980, the U.S. early-warning system malfunctioned on four occasions, triggering combat alerts of U.S. strategic forces. The KGB believed that they were not malfunctions but deliberate Pentagon ploys to lower Soviet anxiety and response time during future alerts by lulling them into a false sense of complacency, thereby making them vulnerable to a surprise attack. The Soviets weren’t the only ones frightened by the episodes. Gates reported Brzezinski’s account to him of the November 9, 1979, incident in his memoirs:
Brzezinski was awakened at three in the morning by [his military assistant William] Odom, who told him that some 220 Soviet missiles had been launched against the United States. Brzezinski knew that the President’s decision time to order retaliation was from three to seven minutes after a Soviet launch. Thus he told Odom he would stand by for a further call to confirm a Soviet launch and the intended targets before calling the President. Brzezinski was convinced we had to hit back and told Odom to confirm that the Strategic Air Command was launching its planes. When Odom called back, he reported that he had further confirmation, but that 2,200 missiles had been launched—it was an all-out attack. One minute before Brzezinski intended to telephone the President, Odom called a third time to say that other warning systems were not reporting Soviet launches. Sitting alone in the middle of the night, Brzezinski had not awakened his wife, reckoning that everyone would be dead in half an hour. It had been a false alarm. Someone had mistakenly put military exercise tapes into the computer system. When it was over, Zbig just went back to bed. I doubt he slept much, though.74
The dangerous incident, which was leaked to the press, caused alarm in the Kremlin. Ambassador Dobrynin conveyed Brezhnev’s “extreme anxiety” over what happened. Brzezinski and the Defense Department drafted the response, which senior State Department advisor Marshall Shulman characterized as “gratuitously insulting and inappropriate for the Carter/Brezhnev channel.” Shulman considered it “kindergarten stuff—not worthy of the United States” and wondered, “Why do we have to be so gratuitously snotty?”75
Beset by a struggling economy and a series of poorly handled foreign policy crises, Carter appeared weak and out of touch as the 1980 election approached. Perhaps the final nail in his coffin came in April 1980, when the United States completely bungled a hostage rescue attempt, leaving eight Americans dead in the Iranian desert after a helicopter collided with a refueling plane. The Iranian government triumphantly displayed the charred bodies, adding to the humiliation. Secretary of State Cyrus Vance, who had consistently opposed this harebrained scheme, resigned in protest—something no secretary of state had done since William Jennings Bryan. He wrote his letter of resignation four days before the ill-fated raid. Columnist Mary McGrory noted that Vance had served in the Johnson administration during another war he had come to oppose and knew full well that his resignation would be divisive at a critical time. In fact, she wrote, “He apparently intends it to be. He found out a long time ago that keeping your mouth shut during discussions of madness is often the greatest disservice you can do your country.”76 Carter’s approval rating plummeted to 40 percent.
Although widely recognized as the most respected member of the administration, Vance had been increasingly marginalized for quite some time as Brzezinski’s hawkish views drowned out Vance’s efforts at diplomacy. Vance’s influence had steadily waned and, by the late 1970s, virtually disappeared. The Washington Post observed, “Mr. Vance had fallen out of phase with the president. The secretary, and the early Carter, spoke for a benevolent and rationalistic world in which the United States, by accommodating certain legitimate imperatives of others, would find its proper place. The world to which Mr. Carter, much more than Mr. Vance, has sought to adjust recently is one in which factors of power and perversity loom large.”77 As the Wall Street Journal noted, the motivating force behind Vance’s decision was “the increasingly hawkish tone in the administration’s foreign policy,” beginning in 1978 with the president “buying the case put by . . . Brzezinski.”78 Vance weighed in a few days later, telling an interviewer that the national security advisor should act as the coordinator of different views, “But he should not be the one who makes foreign policy or who expresses foreign policy to the public.”79
Brzezinski and Secretary of State Cyrus Vance. Although widely recognized as the most respected member of the administration, Vance was marginalized as Brzezinski’s hawkish views drowned out the secretary of state’s efforts at diplomacy. In April 1980, Vance resigned in protest after the United States completely bungled an attempt to rescue the American hostages in Tehran, leaving eight Americans dead in the Iranian desert after a helicopter collided with a refueling plane.
Carter himself entered the fray a few days later. In what seemed a very petty reaction, he told a Philadelphia town meeting that his new secretary of state, Edmund Muskie, would be “a much stronger and more statesmanlike senior citizen figure who will be a more evocative spokesman for our nation’s policy” than Vance had been. For Carter, who had been holed up in the White House throughout the Iran hostage crisis, a symbolic hostage of his own making, it was the first major public address outside Washington in over six months.80
Following the Iranian Revolution, U.S. officials cozied up to Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, whom they saw as a regional counterweight to the hostile Iranian regime. They fea
red that Iranian-style Islamic fundamentalism could threaten pro-American regimes in Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and Jordan. Brzezinski strategized ways to sever Iraq from the Soviet orbit. In September 1980, Saddam, with at least tacit U.S. approval, invaded neighboring Iran, attacking across the Shatt al-Arab waterway leading to the Persian Gulf. Iraq, however, did not secure the easy victory that U.S. intelligence sources had predicted. Within a week, the United Nations called for a cease-fire. In late October, Carter, playing both sides, announced that if the Iranians released the U.S. hostages, the United States would send the $300 million to $500 million in arms that had been purchased by the prior regime. Reaganites smelled an “October surprise” that would hand Carter the election. In what Carter White House Iran aide and Columbia University political scientist Gary Sick called “a political coup,” a group of Reagan supporters were alleged to have cut a deal with the Iranian government. At the time, the presidential race was still tight. Some mid-October polls even had Carter in the lead. The details are murky and impossible to confirm, but it appears that Reagan campaign officials met with Iranian leaders and promised to allow Israel to ship arms to Iran if Iran would hold the hostages until Reagan won the election. In response to a 1992 query from Indiana Congressman Lee Hamilton, the Supreme Soviet’s Committee on Defense and Security Issues reported that a series of secret meetings had taken place in Europe between top Reagan campaign officials and Iranian officials. The Soviet report identified Reagan campaign manager and future CIA Director William Casey, vice presidential candidate and former CIA Director George Bush, and NSC staffer and future CIA Director Robert Gates as attending and offering substantially more military supplies than the Carter team was offering.81 Iran released the embassy personnel on January 21, 1981, Reagan’s first day in office. The United States continued arms sales to Iran via Israel, often channeled through private dealers, for several years. An early chance to end the war, which Saddam offered to do in return for Iraqi control of the Shatt al-Arab waterway and an Iranian promise not to interfere in Iraq, was also squandered. With the United States helping fuel the conflict, the Iran-Iraq War would continue for eight years, leaving, some estimate, over a million dead and costing over a trillion dollars.
