Charlie Wilson's flaw

[go west young man]

The conflict portrayed by director Mike Nichols, in a film as mendacious as it is amusing, bears virtually no resemblance to the real war which convulsed Afghanistan in the eighties. His version sets up Washington's foreign policy as a slapstick affair in which a lightweight congressman almost singlehandedly saves the Afghans from Russian occupation. The complex tragedy that enveloped Afghanistan, unravelled the Soviet Union and strengthened extremists throughout the Muslim world is almost entirely off-screen.

Indeed, it is worse than that. If popular art of this kind reflects what a nation has come to understand about its behaviour in the recent past, this film shows an America that has learned nothing from events, except that the principle that "My enemy's enemy is my friend" is not always a sound basis for decision-making. True, the film derives its energy and interest from America's current dilemmas in Afghanistan and Iraq, but it has, in the end, little to say, directly or obliquely, about them.

Looking back at the 1980s, what is striking is that both America and Russia thought they were struggling with each other, while what was really happening was that both states were trying and failing to cope with powerful new forces in the non-western world. Those forces were taking on the more marked ethnic and religious guises which are very familiar to us today.

http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/martin_woollacott/2008/01/charlie_wilsons_flaw.html