America, Empire of Liberty
Wilson was a swashbuckling cowboy figure given to bringing a high level of subjective judgment to his work on the foreign affairs committee, and who had already arranged massive US financial support for Israel during the 1973 Yom Kippur war. Captivated by the news item, Wilson immediately arranged for covert funding to be channelled to the resistance fighters, which he personally ensured grew to $750m a year — 57% of the CIA’s covert operations budget — and which was multiplied by donations from Saudi Arabia. This funding went on to build a Taliban-run state that actively helped spawn al-Qaida.
For us non-US citizens who have grown up in a world it has dominated, apparently reckless foreign policy decisions seem a recurrent theme. Sixty-five years of superpower omnipotence have had generations of newspaper readers around the world aghast at such policy disasters as post-war Iraq, Vietnam, Lebanon, Somalia and, until recently, virtually all of Central and South America — all of which ran in tandem with the unstoppable and irresistible genius of the USA’s cultural and economic power that so rapidly took over the world since 1945. So how could a country so powerful, so capable and so apparently concerned about ethical and Christian values — and which has done such good — repeatedly get things so wrong?
