From the WSJ Opinion Archives
TASTE COMMENTARY
When Principle Trumped Partisanship
Why Charlie Wilson's war couldn't happen today.
"Charlie Wilson's War," the film treatment of how a party-hearty Texas congressman teamed up with other Cold Warriors to humiliate the Soviet Empire and hasten its end, is a box-office success. After the failure of preachy political films, like "Lions for Lambs" and "Rendition," Hollywood will credit the movie's appeal, in part, to its witty dialogue and biting humor. Fair enough. But the film offers another lesson, for both Hollywood and Washington: Good things can happen when principle trumps partisanship.
I met Charlie Wilson in his heyday in the 1980s. He was an operator and a carousing libertine. But he was honest about it, promising constituents that, if he were caught in a scandal, "I won't blame booze and I won't suddenly find Jesus." He called himself a Scoop Jackson Democrat, after the hawkish senator from Washington state. Mr. Wilson was fiercely anticommunist.
In 1981, two years after the Soviets invaded Afghanistan, Mr. Wilson visited refugee camps in Pakistan at the prodding of Joanne Herring, a conservative Houston socialite he'd been dating. There he saw starving families and Afghan children whose arms had been blown off by explosives disguised as toys. "I decided to grab the commie sons o'bitches by the throat," he told me in a recent interview.
About the same time, President Ronald Reagan was signing top-secret directives to use covert action and economic warfare to weaken the Soviets. These allowed a maverick CIA agent named Gust Avrakotos to team up with Mr. Wilson. Mr. Avrakotos picked a team of agency outcasts to funnel weapons to the Afghans while Mr. Wilson made sure they had the means to do so.
The film tells this story and offers up a series of foils for Mr. Wilson. The CIA station chief in Pakistan is a bureaucratic weasel who doesn't want to upset the Soviets. When Ms. Herring asks Mr. Wilson, "Why is Congress saying one thing and doing nothing?" he responds: "Well, tradition, mostly."
In the end, Mr. Wilson used his perch on the House Defense Appropriations Subcommittee to expand covert aid to the Afghans to $1 billion a year from $5 million. House Speaker Tip O'Neill gave him a long leash. Other Democrats, intent on blocking White House support for the Nicaraguan Contras, happily let Mr. Wilson have his way to bolster their own anticommunist credentials.
Gradually the operation wore down Soviet morale. On the first day that shoulder-fired Stinger anti-aircraft missiles reached the mujahedeen fighters in Afghanistan, in September 1986, three Soviet helicopter gunships were downed. "They flew, they died" is how Mr. Wilson puts it. In early 1989, the last Soviet troops pulled out, and the experience persuaded the Politburo to think twice about putting down rebellions in Eastern Europe. Within months, the Berlin Wall fell.
As the film notes, the U.S. failed to follow up in Afghanistan and allowed chaos to develop. Years later, the Taliban took over, eventually giving safe haven to Osama bin Laden. But the film stops well short of blaming the U.S. for creating conditions that led to 9/11. As Mr. Wilson says, not a single Afghan has participated in any attack against the U.S.
Mr. Wilson, 74, is now mending nicely from a heart transplant. He is generous with praise for his comrades-in-skulduggery. "We won because there was no partisanship or damaging leaks," he emphasizes. But he believes that nothing like the Afghan operation could survive today's poisonous Washington atmosphere.
Tom Hanks, who plays Mr. Wilson in the film, has fretted that he, screenwriter Aaron Sorkin and director Mike Nichols will be attacked by the right as "a bunch of Democrats who are taking potshots at the war in Iraq." He needn't worry. Mr. Hanks and his fellow filmmakers have produced a rousing paean to America's can-do spirit. They have resisted the temptation to comment on any current U.S. foreign policy missteps and highlighted how, not so long ago, one ornery congressman and a few friends helped change the world.
Mr. Fund is a columnist for OpinionJournal.com.
