by Jason Daniel Baker

Created on: June 18, 2008

Charlie Wilson's War (2007) Starring Tom Hanks, Julia Roberts, Phillip Seymour Hoffman, Amy Adams, Ned Beatty, Emily Blunt, Om Puri, Ken Stott, John Slattery, Denis O'Hare, Jud Tylor, Peter Gerety, Shiri Appleby, Brian Markinson, Rachel Nichols, Hilary Angelo, Cyia Batten, Mary Bonner Baker, Wynn Everett, Carly Reeves, Tracy Phillips, Spencer Garrett, Kevin Cooney, Jim Jansen.

Directed by Mike Nichols.

Running time: 102 minutes.

Rating: R

"Is that meant to be a funny joke?"

Tom Hanks portrays a Democrat politician who has the gravitas to use legislative power to unleash brutal force in accomplishing a foreign policy goal. Instead of acting like the knee-jerk liberal Hanks is in real life. Got the district picked out yet, Tom?

In December 1979 roughly 130,000 Soviet soldiers rather nonchalantly entered the sovereign (albeit wartorn since 1973) nation of Afghanistan and set up shop. They proceeded to then massacre in cold blood unarmed men, women and children on a massive scale commensurate with the respective slaughters taking place in Cambodia and Uganda in the early to mid-1970s. It was reminiscent in scale with the Stalinist purge of the Kulaks and the Nazi mass murder of Jews or any holocaust you can name in history.

As we see depicted in this film U.S. Intelligence knew all about it down to the minutest details. As with most aspects of American government during the Carter administration they were not merely impotent to solve complicated problems but actually content to sit on their hands and hope that it would go away.

Yet in this instance it may also have merely been consistent with a minimalist approach to black ops. Running Afghanistan with the most brutal of iron fists remains to this day a severe headache for any nation unfortunate enough to try it. Letting the Soviets have it was not an unreasonable proposition for even their most vehement opponents.

Politicians like the one portrayed by Ned Beatty in this film were optimistic that fundamentalist Muslims and godless Soviets could cancel each other out. They were oblivious to the collateral damage of Afghan villagers. There were a lot of them.

Charlie Wilson (portrayed by Tom Hanks here) was a seemingly minor Democrat congressman (Texas second congressional district) who partied hard at night and still drank Chivas Regal from his coffee cup during morning meetings. He had a mostly liberal voting record (almost a pre-requisite for getting elected in Texas in the 1970s from either major party) and surrounded

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