I was thinking of Melinda’s wise words after we saw The Good Shepherd.

In case you haven’t seen the spy movie, I won’t give away the plot. Matt Damon stars as Edward Wilson, a character partly based on James Jesus Angleton, the famous CIA spymaster.

"As the years pass, [Wilson]...develops a kind of moral blankness disguised as service to his country," wrote Eleanor Ringel Gillespie in an Atlanta Journal-Constitution movie review. "Wilson drifts through the highlights of the cold war impervious to his lethal machinations," according to Wesley Morris’ review in The Boston Globe.

"Moral blankness disguised as service to … country," is a good definition of the CIA and the Soviet KGB. Throughout the cold war, both spy agencies operated in the my-country-right-or-wrong mode.

I’m not anti-spy. Good intelligence helps win wars, cold or hot.

Of course, we expected "moral blankness" from the Soviets. Far from the "workers’ paradise" Lenin promised, the U.S.S.R. became a brutal totalitarian state under Stalin, aptly dubbed the Red Czar.

We were supposed to be different. Hence, the CIA's "moral blankness" mocked our democratic principles and made us look like hypocrites. "Moral blankness" proved impractical, too, driving millions of people to communism.

Guiding the real Edward Wilsons were presidents of "moral blankness."  Republicans and Democrats, they armed and bankrolled dictators whose job was to make their countries safe for American economic and military interests.

"He may be a son-of-a-bitch, but he’s our son-of-a-bitch," FDR supposedly said privately of a Latin American strongman. Other U.S. presidents openly cozied up with despots. At the White House, Ronald Reagan toasted Philippine dictator Ferdinand Marcos and his shoe-happy spouse for "the shared values which unite us."

"Our" SOBs helped pushed China, Cuba and Vietnam to the communist side.

Chiang Kai-shek, our man in China, was pro-American but not pro-democracy. He lost to Chairman Mao.

Before dictator Castro in Cuba, there was dictator Fulgencio Batista. Likewise, our puppet rulers in South Vietnam were as anti-democratic as they were anti-communist.

We were supposed to be the good guys in the cold war, defenders of the "free world" against the Red Menace. We preached democracy but didn’t always practice it, as The Good Shepherd suggests.

In the movie, a new leader the U.S. doesn’t like gains power in a Latin American nation. He sticks up for poor peasants who toil long hours at low pay on coffee plantations, presumably U.S.-owned.

Wilson sends small airplanes to bombard coffee plants with swarms of hungry grasshoppers. Later, the leader is murdered in a Wilson-sponsored coup.

With Arbenz dead, Col. Carlos Castillo Armas, a U.S.-backed dictator, took over. Right on cue, Armas handed "the land back to United Fruit, abolished the tax on dividends to foreign investors, eliminated the secret ballot, and jailed thousands of political critics," Zinn wrote.

From the Bolshevik Revolution through the cold war, communists never toppled a genuinely democratic government. The Czar, history instructs, begat the Bolsheviks.

Our "moral blankness" was wrong time and time again – and it didn't work. Old cold warriors would doubtless disagree. They would probably argue that the CIA helped us win the cold war precisely because of Edward Wilsonian "moral blankness." Spying, Morris wrote in his review, is "a deadly, dirty job."

Indeed it is. But if we had consistently practiced what we preached about democracy in the world, we might have won the cold war sooner and without the loss of so much precious blood and treasure in Korea, Vietnam and elsewhere.

"Moral blankness" is tragically apparent in Iraq, too. British journalist Robert Fisk correctly characterized Saddam Hussein as "the Beast of Baghdad, the Hitler of the Tigris, the man who murdered untold hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqis while spraying chemical weapons over his enemies."

But writing in The Independent, Fisk pointed out that Saddam was our guy in the bloody Iran-Iraq war. "Who encouraged Saddam to invade Iran in 1980, which was the greatest war crime he has committed for it led to the deaths of a million and a half souls?" Fisk asked.

"And who sold him the components for the chemical weapons with which he drenched Iran and the Kurds? We did. No wonder the Americans, who controlled Saddam's weird trial, forbad any mention of this, his most obscene atrocity, in the charges against him. Could he not have been handed over to the Iranians for sentencing for this massive war crime? Of course not. Because that would also expose our culpability."