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A favorite holiday pastime, especially when one needs a break from the holiday visitors, is to escape into a comfy, dark theater and watch the annual holiday blockbuster. I’ll predict that this year’s blockbuster will be “Charlie Wilson’s War.” I knew I needed to get to the theater early on the movie’s second day on the big screen, but I didn’t realize that the theater would be almost sold out at the 10:20 a.m. show on the Saturday morning before Christmas. Why would a movie that takes us back to pre-Osama bin Laden, pre-Taliban and pre-9/11 be so popular on one the busiest days of the year?
Some might argue that it’s the star appeal that would cause people to choose a movie over last minute shopping on Dec. 22. I don’t want to take anything away from leading actors Tom Hanks and Julia Roberts, as they were outstanding, but I think America’s interest in this film has more to do with, to quote the Talking Heads, “How did I (we) get here?” Here, as in the failing states of Iraq and Afghanistan.
We now count our dead in the thousands and wounded in the tens of thousands; the Iraqi dead and wounded are counted in the hundreds of thousands and refugees in the millions; the money we’ve spent is counted in the hundreds of billions with another $70 billion on the way and $40 billion more that will be requested soon. There are a lot of zeros behind these grave statistics. Americans want answers, and if we can get answers, we’ll take laughs and a trip back in time. “Charlie Wilson’s War” delivers both answers and laughs and does a masterful job of helping us understand the genesis of our current predicament in Iraq and Afghanistan and raises some red flags in case anyone on Capitol Hill is watching. I doubt “Charlie Wilson’s War” will make it to the White House screening room.
Without giving too much away, the movie is about how one person can make a difference – an enormous difference. And yet, despite all the efforts, that enormous difference can fall short of the mark necessary to ensure America’s long-term interests are served.
While the movie is about how this one man, former Rep. Charlie Wilson, D-Texas, was able to harness enough money to wage a covert war in Afghanistan that ultimately led to the defeat of the Soviet Army, it is also about America. After covering the White House and Capitol Hill for more than 14 years, I can say that the movie is as accurate depiction of how our system works or doesn’t work as I have seen on the big screen.
“Charlie Wilson’s War” was a great trip down Cold War memory lane, and the insight it provided into how we managed to blow post covert war Afghanistan was also commendable. But I think for those who have been to Iraq or who have closely watched Iraq from our shores, the greatest intended or unintended consequence of “Charlie Wilson’s War” came from the striking parallel between the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the U.S. invasion of Iraq.
The United States marched into Iraq against the will of the world and without provocation. Sound familiar? We overthrew a government that is as legitimate as any other dictatorship in the area. Based on the instability that we started and cannot stop, wayward bombs and unintended collateral damage have caused irreparable harm to civilian Iraqi persons and property. We are directly and indirectly responsible for more than 4 million refugees. Most of these refugees, like in “Charlie Wilson’s War,” are women and children and farmers. And like in “Charlie Wilson’s War,” many of these civilians were fighting and resisting the enemy of the United States, al-Qaida, until they were forced out of their homes. Of course, let us not forget that al-Qaida was not in Iraq until we were in Iraq.
The point is made in the beginning and the end of “Charlie Wilson’s War” that the Soviet’s aggression into Afghanistan and their subsequent withdrawal/defeat, is what led to the fall of communism and the Soviet State as a world superpower. As they say, history does not always repeat itself, but in this case it may rhyme.
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Josh Hammer