Charlie Wilson's War

I stole your ant and everything bad is Bill Clinton's fault.
Just wait until Hillary is elected. The republic will fail.

 

Are you a complete idiot? (Rhetorical question. I already know the answer.) The Taliban was "getting cranked up" in the 1980s using weapons and training paid for by the United States --- Charlie Wilson's war, if you will. Had our government stayed involved to pick up the pieces and put Afghanistan back together, Osama would not have had a place to run to when the Sudanese government ran him out on a rail.

 

9/11 was not about Afganistan nor Saudi Arabia. What it was about was a group of radical islamists who hate the United States for its support of Israel. Afganistan provided a convenient location for Bin Laden to operate from when he was tossed from Sudan.

The question I have is whether Bin Laden really was part of the anti US muslim sect or was just an opportunist looking to exploit the situation for his own gain. Also wonder if we will find out that Bin Laden was part of CIA operation in the 80's and felt that in some way was double crossed resulting in 9/11 payback.

 

If that's the case, wouldn't it place a good portion of the blame on Reagan's doorstep?

 

This was alluded to at the end of the movie ... Wilson's asking the comittee for $1 million --- after he'd raised $500 million --- to build and fund a school so as to extend the impact of US generosity indefinitely. The committee didn't see the point.

 

I thought the transcribed Wilson quote that closes the movie summed it up succinctly enough.

 

Holy god.
There's so much bad history in there that it'll take a month to unpack. I think the use of the utterly meaningless term "Islamofascists" is the loudest and most garish giveaway. "Carter's lawyers had us neutered?" I'd like an offer of proof there, and The Boland Amendment was a response to an illegal war being run out of the WH basement on behalf of bloodthirsty terrorist thugs who raped and murdered American nuns and slaughtered American Jesuits, to say nothing of what they did to their own people. "The spooks" at this time were busy chasing mythical Soviet moles, overestimating Soviet defense capabilities, and otherwise missing ever hint that the USSR was collapsing from within. (For all his faults, Wilson at least had a vague sense of that.) The Soviet military went into Afghanistan because of imperial hubris, not because they perceived us as "weak." The Soviet generals knew full well that the military establishment was crumbling vis a vis our own. They went into Afghanistan because they didn't want a wildfire of several Islamic republics on their Southern border.

 

Can you answer the question about Julia? Did she try, or mail it in?

 

F_B, I agree with a significant part of your preceding rant, with the exception of one phrase:

Aldrich Ames. And according to former CIA agent Milt Bearden in his book The Main Enemy, there's at least one more high-level Soviet-Russian mole at Langley who, like Ames and FBI turncoat Robert Hanssen, caused significant damage to American espionage networks. That other mole was never caught, and if I remember right that mole predated both Ames and Hanssen. This WaPost article from 1994 supports that allegation. Angleton was led too far astray by Golitzin in 1961, but there's no question the CIA had leaks.

 

She did well. Overshadowed by Hoffman and Hanks.