C: is for the cinematic creation of 'Charlie Wilson's War'

The new magazine is ready but I have yet to link it to www.xporefacts.com. To see it paste this code into your browser. It should be linked soon. http://web.mac.com/suzannabowling/iWeb/xplorefacts.com/xplorefacts%20.html

I originally wrote this column, then I went to see 'Charlie Wilson's War'. I was in school when this was happening and remember hearing snippets of the covert CIA operation to support Afghanistan. Congressman Charles Wilson and CIA operative Gust Avrokotos's guile, determination, and utter disregard for the rules made a quixotic undertaking a reality. Impossible personalities prevail against impossible odds to defeat the perceived communistic threat. The utter chaos of the region's history, politics, and religious, ethnic, and territorial turmoil have direct connections to our present day difficulties with Afghanistan and the Islamic world. This is an object lesson into our current relationships in the Middle East. Throughout this story you will be struck time and time again by the sheer magnitude of the undertaking, the force of the personalities, and the effect they had on the entire world.
In the early summer of 1980, Wilson saw a Dan Rather expose describing hundreds of thousands of refugees fleeing Afghanistan. He then reads off the AP wire the intensity of the situation and gets funding to double from the US Congressional Appropriations Committee. Wilson was on the Defense Appropriations subcommittee, a small panel of lawmakers in the House responsible for funding CIA operations, putting him in a position to do such. From $5 million to an extraordinary $300 million, with $17 million earmarked for anti-aircraft weapons that could take down Soviet Mil Mi-24 helicopters that caused heavy damage and casualties to the Afghan Mujahideen.
But we'll be damned by history if we let them fight with stones. For the Mujahedin became the Taliban and Osama bin Laden. "Great events have unintended consequences. What no one involved anticipated was that it might be dangerous to awaken the dormant dreams and visions of Islam. Which is, of course, exactly what happened." So what was intended as a tribute to American ends unintentionally as a sobering narrative of American lack of foresight.

Go see this film. Google and research, for we need to remember history or we will keep on making mistakes and that is a F.A.C.T.