Now, I haven’t seen the movie Charlie Wilson’s War, and to be honest it looks entertaining, but I have recently read a few articles expressing some angst about some rather large omissions and one specific fallacy noted in the movie.

This piece seems to sum it all up pretty well, but the gist is that many observers have noticed President Reagan, despite his tremendous leadership on the issue, is not given even one iota of credit in the movie for winning the Cold War. Sure, Congressman Charlie Wilson played a role, but Reagan was the one forging the path ahead. In fact, in contrast to the apparent plot in the movie, Charlie Wilson and his CIA buddy needed quite a bit of prodding from conservative Republicans before they were convinced it was worth it to send Stinger missiles to the rebels in Afghanistan.

On top of this glaring oversight is the vexing inclusion of a myth that the US funded Osama bin Laden and the al Qaida terror network against the Soviets. This simply isn’t true, as bin Laden never received any funding from the United States and didn’t begin his little holy war until well after we had left the country.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 26th, 2007 at 10:21 am and is filed under Pop-Culture, Terrorism. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.