There are days when I think that one has to think back to Harry Truman to recall the days that Democrat leaders in this country actually rooted against the bad guys, and for the good guys, but this movie is an accurate historic portrayal of a more recent day when men like Scoop Jackson, Charlie Wilson, Sam Nunn, and Doc Long actually existed in the Democratic Party. Surely these men would be forced to run as Republicans in the MoveOn.org culture of today's democratic party, but of course Truman and Kennedy would be forced to as well.
Ultimately, the movie does have the handprint of Hollywood leftist, Aaron Sorkin, on it, but he did a remarkably good job at avoiding inane and revisionist Reagan-bashing throughout the flick. Charlie Wilson himself has repeatedly affirmed that Reagan himself personally authorized much of the operation that the movie is about, and any attempt to portray success in Afghanistan, while implying that such success happened despite Ronald Reagan, is historically offensive. I do not think the movie argues such, and for that, it should be commended.
The film's complete silence about Ronald Reagan is the best we can hope for from Hollywood these days, though perhaps they learned the lesson of other contemporary attempts to bash the foreign policy posture Reagan stood for (think: Lions for Lambs, Rendition, etc.). Ignoring the success of the surge, naming Vladimar Putin the Time Man of the Year (as opposed to Gen. Petraeus), and generally bashing all things related to American and her military, apparently are popular things in the mainstream press. What doesn't appear to work so well for production companies hoping to avoid box office bombs with the American people, however, is creating fantasy-drivel with the sole purpose of demonstrating Bush-hysteria, and America-demonization.
This movie appropriately concludes by demonstrating the disaster of saving Afghanistan from the Soviets, without being prepared to see the entire matter through. It was flabbergasting to me to hear the crowded theater cheer at Wilson's exhortation near the end of the movie that we "f&*%'d the whole thing up" by not seeing it through, while presumably many of the same applauders have been extremely ready to see us cut and run in Iraq. The lesson of Charlie Wilson's War is that doing the right humanitarian thing is usually the right thing for our nation's safety as well (liberating the countless women and children who were being decimated by the evil empire was compelling enough, yet the role it played in ending the cold war can not be viewed as mere "icing on the cake"). The reason for this is that good has a duty to defeat evil, with all the pragmatic and principled ramifications this entails. May we fight Charlie Wilson's battles today with the same vigor he did yesterday, and yet may we learn what history has taught us, and finish the war all the way through.
It is what the great Democrats of yesteryear would have wanted.
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