[LiteKeeper]

read later

[theDentist]

"...we have the world's shortest attention span,"

Comes from a nation watching too many sit-coms and tied-up-in-a-neat-bow cop shows.

[OESY]

The film omitted all but an oblique reference to a "Republican president and Democratic Congress" toward the end.

Tom Hanks is no Charlie Wilson calling for us to learn lessons, and finish the job in Iraq.

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[dfwgator]

Sounds like Wilson is the kind of Democrat that is sadly lacking these days. A Democrat who is a patriot.

[GodGunsGuts]

Good find!

[Liberty Valance]

"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."

Reminds me of a time when we could actually call democrats 'the loyal opposition'. Charlie is right. Iraq has proved it once again.

[Nathan Zachary]

"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.

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.

[Perseverando]

“Keywords” are our friends.

The History Channel had a program on Charlie Wilson a couple of months ago. Found it very interesting and informative.

[Tallguy]

Charlie Wilson's War" ends with a cautionary note about the lack of follow-through that left a power vacuum in Afghanistan.

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".

[Tallguy]

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.

[jdub]

I read the book a couple of years ago, and saw the documentary and plan to see the movie. Charlie is a good-ole-boy.

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".

[DesScorp]

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.

[LS]

It was a good movie, and a better book. At one point, Wilson (largely on his own), pushed the CIA into approving transfers of ISRAELI weapons, with funding matched by SAUDIS, transmitted through PAKISTAN, for the AFGHANS!! And not one bullet had U.S. markings on it. (The Paks said they'd accept the Jewish weapons if the boxes did not have a "f-ing Star of David" on them.

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!!