The Untold History of the United States

by Oliver Stone

  On Christmas Day, having lost his base of support, Gorbachev resigned. The Soviet Union was no more. The Cold War had ended. The most visionary and transformative leader of the twentieth century had yielded power. Even some people in the United States had come to appreciate the immensity of his contribution. James Baker had said to him in September 1990, “Mr. President . . . nobody in the world has ever tried what you and your supporters are trying today. . . . I’ve seen a lot, but I’ve never met a politician with as much bravery and courage as you have.”56

  As wasteful and dangerous as the Cold War was, it had brought a kind of structure and stability. What would happen now? Would peace and tranquility return? The United States had been blaming social and political upheaval on the Soviet Union for the previous forty-six years. In truth, though, the Soviets had more often than not exercised restraint upon their allies. And what would now become of the United States’ vast military and intelligence establishment, which had been constructed to counter a deliberately exaggerated Soviet threat? How would the hawks justify the bloated military budget that for decades had diverted resources from needed development to expensive weaponry and gaudy defense sector profits? And what would come of Gorbachev’s promise to reduce the once massive Soviet nuclear arsenal to less than 5,000 warheads?

  The answers would soon be forthcoming. In 1992, Paul Wolfowitz oversaw the creation of a new “Defense Planning Guidance,” forecasting future challenges to U.S. interests. An early draft insisted that the United States not allow any rival to emerge that could threaten U.S. global hegemony and that it take unilateral and preemptive action against states attempting to acquire weapons of mass destruction (WMD). The draft outlined seven potential war scenarios and warned that the United States must be prepared to simultaneously fight wars against North Korea and Iraq, while resisting a Russian incursion into Europe. The New York Times reported that the classified “documents suggest levels of manpower and weapons that would appear to stall, if not reverse, the downward trend in military spending by the mid-1990s.”57

  Bush and Gorbachev sign the START I treaty at the Kremlin in Moscow. The treaty would limit both sides to 6,000 strategic nuclear warheads and 1,600 delivery systems. Gorbachev also pushed for the elimination of tactical nuclear weapons, a move endorsed in a study commissioned by Joint Chiefs Chairman Colin Powell. But that was rejected by the Pentagon. Despite the setbacks, both sides made significant unilateral cuts in their nuclear arsenals that would reduce, though not eliminate, the danger of nuclear holocaust.

  The plan provoked a firestorm of criticism at home and abroad. It was a “Pax Americana,” Senator Joseph Biden charged—“an old notion of the United States as the world’s policeman.” Senator Robert Byrd called the Pentagon strategy “myopic, shallow, and disappointing. The basic thrust of the document seems to be this: ‘We love being the sole remaining superpower in the world and we want so much to remain that way that we are willing to put at risk the basic health of our economy and well-being of our people to do so.’ ” Future presidential candidate Pat Buchanan called it “a formula for endless American intervention in quarrels and war when no vital interest of the United States is remotely engaged.” The New York Times decried its “chest-thumping unilateralism.” The Pentagon backpedaled so fast that it tripped over its own lies. A Pentagon spokesman insisted that the plan hadn’t been seen by Wolfowitz, who drafted it, or by Cheney, though he admitted that it was in line with Cheney’s thinking.58

  Bush’s 91 percent approval rating at the end of the Persian Gulf War blinded leading Democrats to his electoral vulnerability, leaving the door open for Arkansas Governor Bill Clinton. Clinton, who chaired the centrist Democratic Leadership Council, ran as a “new kind of Democrat”—one positioned midway between the liberals and the conservatives. He promised a business-friendly administration that would lower the deficit, cut middle-class taxes, strengthen the military, and “end welfare as we know it.” With Ross Perot siphoning off 19 percent of the popular vote, Clinton trounced Bush in the electoral college.

  The Democrats’ euphoria over capturing the White House proved short-lived. Republicans weakened Clinton out of the gate by blocking his attempt to secure the open admission of gays into the military, but the much more telling blow would be struck in defeating his plan to overhaul the health care system. Among advanced industrial countries, only the United States and apartheid South Africa lacked a national health care system. The Republicans and their business allies spent $50 million to frighten the American public and deny health care coverage to tens of millions of citizens. Richard Armey, chair of the House Republican Conference, prepared for what he called “the most important domestic policy debate of the past half century . . . the Battle of the Bulge of big-government liberalism.” Armey believed, “The failure of the Clinton plan will . . . leave the President’s agenda weakened, his . . . supporters demoralized, and the opposition emboldened. Our market-oriented ideas will suddenly become thinkable, not just on health care, but on a host of issues. . . . Historians may mark it as . . . the start of the Republican renaissance.”59

  The 1994 midterm elections gave Republicans control of both branches of Congress for the first time in forty years. Both parties lurched further to the right. Succumbing to conservative pressure, Clinton ended Aid to Families with Dependent Children, which had helped poor families since the Great Depression, and supported a war on drugs and tough-on-crime legislation. The U.S. prison population exploded from a half million in 1980 to 2 million twenty years later. Forty-five percent of those incarcerated were African American, and 15 percent were Hispanic.

  Post-Soviet Russia also moved to the right. Yeltsin turned to Harvard economist Jeffrey Sachs and other USAID-funded Harvard experts for help in privatizing the economy. Sachs had advised on Poland’s initial transformation from socialism to capitalism, an effort that would double poverty in two years and, by some estimates, plunge over half of Poland’s population into poverty by 2003. Sachs and company encouraged First Deputy Prime Minister Yegor Gaidar and Deputy Prime Minister Anatoly Chubais to subject Russia to even more intense “shock therapy” than Poland had experienced. Gorbachev had resisted similar demands by the G7, IMF, and World Bank. Another key player was Undersecretary of the Treasury Lawrence Summers. As the World Bank’s chief economist, he had recently created a furor by signing a supposedly sarcastic memo, declaring, “The economic logic behind dumping . . . toxic waste in the lowest wage country is impeccable,” adding, “I’ve always thought that under-populated countries in Africa are vastly UNDER-polluted.” Brazil’s secretary of the environment told Summers, “Your reasoning is perfectly logical but totally insane . . . a concrete example of the unbelievable alienation, . . . social ruthlessness and . . . arrogant ignorance of many conventional ‘economists.’ ”60

  Russia’s flirtation with crony capitalism proved equally insane. Before the Russian people knew what hit them, Yeltsin had deregulated the economy, privatized state enterprises and resources, eliminated desperately needed subsidies and price controls, and established privately owned monopolies. The Western aid and debt relief that Sachs promised never materialized. Sachs later blamed Cheney and Wolfowitz for pursuing “long-term U.S. military dominance over . . . Russia.”61 Conditions worsened while Clinton was in office. In what Russians called the “great grab,” the nation’s factories and resources were sold off for a pittance to private investors, including former Communist officials, who became multimillionaires overnight.

  Yeltsin responded to the popular outcry against his policies by dissolving parliament, suspending the Constitution, and ruling primarily by decree for the rest of the decade. The World Bank’s chief economist for Russia told the Wall Street Journal, “I’ve never had so much fun in my life.”62

  The Russian people didn’t share in the frivolity. Russia’s economy collapsed. Hyperinflation wiped out people’s life savings. Tens of millions of workers lost their jobs. Life expectancy plummeted from sixty-six to fifty-se
ven years. By 1998, more than 80 percent of Russian farms had gone bankrupt. Russian GDP had been almost cut in half. The Russian economy shrank to the size of Holland’s. In 2000, capital investment stood at 20 percent of what it had been a decade earlier. Fifty percent of Russians earned less than $35 per month—the official poverty line—and many hovered just above. Russia was rapidly becoming a third-world nation. Embittered, Russians joked that they thought the Communists had been lying to them about socialism and capitalism, but it turned out they were only lying about socialism.

  Sachsonomics worked similar miracles in the other former Soviet republics, where the number of people living in poverty jumped from 14 million in 1989 to 147 million—and that was before the crash of 1998. Famed Russian novelist Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who returned to Russia after being exiled for two decades, described the situation in 2000:

  As a result of the Yeltsin era, all the fundamental sectors of our state, economic, cultural, and moral life have been destroyed or looted. We live literally amid ruins, but we pretend to have a normal life. . . . great reforms . . . being carried out in our country . . . were false reforms because they left more than half of our people in poverty. . . . Will we continue looting and destroying Russia until nothing is left? . . . God forbid these reforms should continue.63

  Popular disdain for Yeltsin fueled anti-Americanism. Russians also bristled over U.S. involvement in the energy-rich Caspian Basin region and expansion of NATO to include Hungary, Poland, and the Czech Republic—a move that ninety-two-year-old George Kennan called “an enormous and historic strategic error.” Russians condemned the U.S.-led NATO bombing of fellow Slavs in Yugoslavia in 1999. One survey reported that 96 percent of Russians considered the bombing a “crime against humanity.” In 2000, 81 percent saw U.S. policy as anti-Russian, most respondents believing that the United States was imposing a “reverse iron curtain” on Russia’s borders.64 Economically crippled, Russia placed greater reliance on its nuclear arsenal as its last line of defense, broadened the circumstances under which it would use nuclear weapons, and began modernizing its arsenal.

  Dangerous incidents occurred. In 1995, Soviet radar operators mistook a Norwegian rocket launch for an incoming ballistic missile. Yeltsin activated his nuclear football for the first time. He and his top military advisors debated whether to launch a nuclear counterattack against the United States until Russia’s nine early-warning satellites confirmed that Russia was not under attack and the crisis ended. By 2000, only two of those satellites were still operating, leaving Russia blind for much of each day.

  Polls showed Russians preferring order over democracy, with growing numbers pining for the “good old days” of Stalin. Though Clinton extolled Yeltsin as the architect of democracy, the Russian people deplored his illegal shutdown of and armed assault on the elected parliament, his launching of a bloody war against the breakaway republic of Chechnya in 1994, and his stewardship of the collapsing economy. Gorbachev denounced Yeltsin as a “liar” who had more privileges than the Russian tsars.65 Polling single-digit approval ratings, Yeltsin resigned on December 31, 1999, and was replaced by former KGB officer Vladimir Putin.

  Once Afghanistan’s Russian-backed government fell in 1992, the United States lost interest in that distant, barren land, where life expectancy stood at forty-six years. A bloody civil war erupted between various Islamist factions and ethnic groups. One consisted largely of Afghan refugees recruited from madrassas—Saudi-sponsored religious schools in Pakistan. These fanatical religious students, or talibs, formed the Taliban—with help from the Pakistani intelligence service. Many had already received military training in CIA-financed camps. Most had studied textbooks developed by the University of Nebraska at Omaha’s (UNO) Center for Afghanistan Studies in a program funded by USAID to the tune of $51 million between 1984 and 1994. Published in Dari and Pashtu, the dominant Afghan languages, the books were designed to stoke Islamic fanaticism and spur resistance to the Soviet invaders. Page after page was filled with militant Islamic teachings and violent images. Children learned to count using pictures of missiles, tanks, land mines, Kalashnikovs, and dead Soviet soldiers. One leading Afghan educator said, “The pictures . . . are horrendous to school students, but the texts are even much worse.” One, for example, shows a soldier adorned with a bandolier and a Kalashnikov. Above him is a verse from the Koran. Below is a statement about the mujahideen, who, in obedience to Allah, willingly sacrifice their lives and fortunes to impose Sharia law on the government. Students learned to read by studying stories about jihad. When the Taliban seized Kabul in 1996, they continued using the same violent jihadist texts, simply removing the human images, which they considered blasphemous.66 Girls would be spared the indignity of seeing such texts, though; they were banned from school entirely. The Taliban subjected all Afghans to the most extreme Sharia law, banning visual images and instituting public amputations, beatings, and executions. Women lost all rights, including the rights to work and to go out in public without a male escort.

  President Clinton and Russian leader Boris Yeltsin share a laugh during a press conference at FDR’s home in Hyde Park, New York, in October 1995. Though Clinton extolled Yeltsin as the architect of democracy, the Russian people deplored his illegal shutdown of and armed assault on the elected parliament, his launching of a bloody war against the breakaway republic of Chechnya in 1994, and his stewardship of the collapsing economy. Gorbachev denounced Yeltsin as a “liar” who had more privileges than the Russian tsars.

  Also in 1996, the Taliban welcomed a young Saudi named Osama bin Laden back to Afghanistan. He returned as head of Al-Qaeda (The Base), an extremist organization committed to driving the United States and its allies out of the Muslim world and reestablishing the caliphate. He had been part of the CIA netherworld, recruiting and training the foreign militants who flooded into Afghanistan to battle the Soviet infidels. Funding came largely from Saudi royal family members eager to spread their strict Wahhabist form of Islam. Bin Laden’s father was one of Saudi Arabia’s wealthiest men. Above all else, bin Laden decried the presence of the United States’ “infidel armies” in Saudi Arabia, Islam’s holiest land, and condemned U.S. support for Israel. Openly pledging to expunge U.S. allies in Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Egypt, and Palestine, he issued his first fatwa in 1992, calling for jihad against the Western occupation of Islamic lands.

  Bin Laden delivered on his threats. A 1995 Al-Qaeda bombing of a U.S. military base in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, killed five U.S. airmen and wounded thirty-four. The following June, a powerful truck bomb destroyed a building in the Khobar Towers complex in Saudi Arabia, killing 19 U.S. airmen and wounding 372. The Saudi government, given its close ties to the bin Laden family, steered the U.S. investigation toward Saudi Shiites tied to Iran. FBI Director Louis Freeh met repeatedly with Saudi Ambassador Prince Bandar bin Sultan, who convinced him that Iran was involved, despite bin Laden’s brazen claims of responsibility for both bombings. Bin Laden experts in the FBI and CIA were handcuffed in their investigations.

  But the Saudi bombing, that year’s bombing of the federal building in Oklahoma City by right-wing domestic terrorists, and the sarin gas attack in a Tokyo subway by Aum Shinrikyo caught the attention of some administration officials. In January 1996, the CIA’s Counterterrorist Center opened a new office. Its sole responsibility was to track Osama bin Laden, who was setting up terrorist training camps in Afghanistan.

  While barely acknowledging the Al-Qaeda threat, Clinton administration officials were alert to investment possibilities in the region. Clinton pushed for building pipelines to ship the oil and gas from former Soviet republics in Central Asia along routes that bypassed Iran and Russia. Studies placed the total value of Central Asian oil and gas reserves at between $3 trillion and $6 trillion. The administration supported efforts by the U.S. oil company Unocal to build a $2 billion pipeline to transport natural gas from Turkmenistan to Pakistan and India. “By Unocal prevailing,” noted a State Department official, “our influe
nce will be solidified, the Russians will be weakened and we can keep Iran from benefiting.”67 Counting on the Taliban to stabilize the war-torn country, Unocal celebrated the Taliban’s seizure of Kabul. It was a “very positive” development, said Unocal’s executive vice president. Neocon Zalmay Khalilzad, a Unocal consultant who had worked in the State Department under Wolfowitz and in the Defense Department under Cheney, agreed. Pakistani journalist Ahmed Rashid explained that some U.S. diplomats “saw them as messianic do-gooders—like born-again Christians from the American Bible Belt.”68

  Page from a Dari language textbook developed by University of Nebraska at Omaha’s (UNO) Center for Afghanistan Studies. An excerpt from the book’s next page reads, “Jihad is the kind of war that Muslims fight in the name of God to free Muslims and Muslim lands from the enemies of Islam. If infidels invade, jihad is the obligation of every Muslim.” Many among Afghanistan’s Taliban had studied such textbooks, whose development was funded by USAID to the tune of $51 million between 1984 and 1994.

  Unocal pulled out all the stops to win approval of its pipeline. It hired the University of Nebraska’s Center for Afghanistan Studies to help it create goodwill and do some needed vocational training. The Center was to teach fourteen basic skills, at least nine of which would be of direct use in building the pipeline. To make this happen, the Center needed to be in the good graces of both of the major rival factions in Afghanistan: the Northern Alliance and the Taliban. The Omaha World-Herald reported that the Northern Alliance “has been criticized by the U.S. State Department, the United Nations and human-rights groups for terrorism, rape, kidnapping of women and children, torture of prisoners and indiscriminate killing of civilians during battles.” And they, by most standards, were the good guys. The Taliban, which then controlled about 75 percent of the country, including the stretches where the pipeline was to run, were accused by Amnesty International of “gender apartheid” and of facilitating the growth of nearly half of the world’s opium supply. When asked why an academic institution would accept such a role, aside from the substantial sum Unocal was paying, the Center’s director Thomas Gouttierre replied, “I don’t assume a private corporation is evil.” Nor did he have much of an issue with the Taliban, whom he described as “the same sort of people who spawned William Jennings Bryan. They’re populists. . . . They are not out there oppressing people.”69