Charlie Wilson's War

If you have not seen Charlie Wilson's War, stop reading. I don't want to have someone find out the ending when they didn't want to.

I just now finished watching Charlie Wilson's War. It was an entertaining movie and told a story I didn't know a lot about. I knew the Soviet's invaded Afghanistan and I knew we helped throw them out, but I didn't know how it was done. I liked the movie, but I felt that the ads for it played up much more humor than what was present.

The thing that kept running through my mind was once we kicked out the Soviets, we left room for the Taliban, which led to the terrorists that flew planes into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. This thought bothered me, because I was thinking should we really be idolizing Charlie Wilson and his CIA pal, the late Gust L. Avrakotos, knowing what we do now?

And then the movie came to the end and you see Charlie struggling -- and failing -- to obtain funding to rebuild the Afghan schools. We helped kick the Soviets out, but we didn't follow through and help the Afghan put their nation back together again. We did nothing. It wasn't on the radar, it wasn't important.

Which leads me to my next thought: What are we going to do in Iraq? Are we really just going to pull out our troops and leave the country devastated? Are we going to finish what we start and rebuild the nation? While we're all fighting over here about the war in Iraq, there are people in Iraq who don't have clean water. And, the reason they don't have clean water is because we wanted to get Saddam Hussein.
So, what are we going to do? Pull out prematurely? Or, fix up the country and perhaps stop the next generation of terrorists?

Something to think about.

God Bless