US President George W. Bush (L) greets former US Rep. Charlie Wilson at the annual White House Correspondents' Association dinner in Washington, April 26, 2008.
Joanne Herring in Afghanistan. A great American.
Posted on 04/28/2008 10:11:23 AM PDT by Tailgunner Joe
Former Rep. Charles Wilson played no official role in the making of last year's film "Charlie Wilson's War," which chronicled how he helped the Mujahedeen repel the invading Soviet army in the 1980s.
If the Texas Democrat had participated, it's clear he would have cast an actor to portray a figure all but ignored in Mike Nichols' production — President Reagan.
"He was absolutely essential to the victory," over the Soviets in Afghanistan, Mr. Wilson says during a phone interview to promote "War," out on DVD this week. ...
Mr. Wilson's work, by all accounts, helped bring about the Soviet's eventual retreat, hastening the end of the Cold War. But other players were just as important to the Soviet's defeat, even if they weren't seen in the Oscar-nominated film.
"If it hadn't been for [Mr. Reagan], there wouldn't have been any Stingers," Mr. Wilson says of the missiles that helped turn the tide in Afghanistan's favor. ...
"Charlie Wilson's War" ends with a cautionary note about the lack of follow-through that left a power vacuum in Afghanistan.
"The American people are a generous people, a creative people, a can-do people, but we have the world's shortest attention span," he says, a lesson he hopes will be applied to the current Iraq war.
"Learn from it. Finish the job," he notes, adding that the United States owes it to Iraq to reconstruct the battered nation. "We must at least try."
Mr. Wilson is less sanguine about the current impasse in the U.S. political system, which he says would have made his work arming the Mujahedeen impossible.
"We couldn't ever fight this war again," he says. "We did the whole thing without a serious leak to the press and without partisan games."
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtontimes.com ...
read later
Comes from a nation watching too many sit-coms and tied-up-in-a-neat-bow cop shows.
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Sounds like Wilson is the kind of Democrat that is sadly lacking these days. A Democrat who is a patriot.
Good find!
If it were up to Democrats, Iraq would be another Vietnam, and all the people worth saving and rebuilding the country for- namely the pro western, Muslim in name only secularists- would be dead like the Cambodians and south Vietnamese the Democrats (thanks John Kerry)and leftist media screwed over.
If Wilson were still in politics, I suspect he’d have to be in Joe Lieberman’s party. ;-)
“Keywords” are our friends.
The History Channel had a program on Charlie Wilson a couple of months ago. Found it very interesting and informative.
This is another chestnut that you hear repeated over & over. What is meant by "follow-through"? The only thing that could have helped the weak & feuding Afghans would have been a MAC-V style military mission which probably would have failed. Then what? Introduction of ground troops? Not likely.
This is the flip-side of covert action. You can't just flip the publicity switch & expect the public to back "the next logical step".
People also forget that while this covert operation was succeeding, the Democrat leadership in Congress was fighting Reagan tooth & nail over Iran-Contra — which boiled down was a dispute over which branch should control foreign policy in Central America. Other than that, the 2 operations were somewhat similar in their mechanics.
The big follow through would be stuff like we’re doing now: building schools, helping the government get established, basic foreign aid type stuff. Some like to call it nation building, the important part is that it’s not just walking away without even so much as a “thanks”. We fought a proxy war in Afghanistan for the better part of a decade and when it ended we left almost as quickly as the Soviets, not only did it leave a power vacuum it turned a lot of people who were our friends into our enemies. Made it pretty clear we were just using them to irritate Russia, didn’t really care about the Afghani people. We made the place ripe for take over by people like the Taliban and then had the audacity to be shocked when it happened.
My favorite Charlie quote was a response to an inquiry about why all his staffers were beautiful women. He replied "You can teach'em to type, but you can't teach'em to grow t*ts".
Good for Charlie for giving President Reagan credit. The latest mantra on the left is that Ronnie had nothing to do with the Soviet Union’s fall.
Comes from a nation watching too many sit-coms and tied-up-in-a-neat-bow cop shows.
Missed that part... Lost interest and didn't read down far enough...
I suspect that the "security environment" in post-Soviet Afghanistan would have forced a military mission on the US fairly early-on. As I said, the US public would probably not have supported such action.
It's the same problem we faced in post-Saddam Iraq. You only need several dozen motivated trouble-makers with a few infantry weapons & some explosives and they can keep a neighborhood in an uproar.
Wilson, through the CIA, got an international medical/doctors' effort on the ground which served as the staging area for moving weapons into Afghanistan.
The movie downplays Reagan, but in truth, this was a case of multiple levels of effort often going down the same road. Ironically, the Dems in the House---who were being viewed nationally as anti-military---had to get behind Wilson's funding bills. So oddly enough, the Contras basically saved the Muj!!
Well, the book is a little clearer on this, blaming the Democrats for obstructing funding under Clinton. But it is true that no one wanted to build schools and hospitals. Whether this would have prevented the Taliban, I doubt. The problem was no leader emerged who could defeat the various warlords-—not even “the Lion” (forget his name-—assassinated right before 9/11).
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