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December 4, 2005

Charlie Wilson's War: This Is Almost A Book Review

Just in time for the holidays -- a new attempt at a semi-regular feature!

So my big plan for this week was that I was going to debut a new feature on ThatKid -- book reviews. I tend to churn through books pretty regularly, said books tend to set me a-thinkin', references to said books tend to turn up in these pages anyway, so why not be a bit more disciplined about sharing what I'm reading? I didn't think I needed to come up with elaborate analyses -- just some top-level stuff on what I'd read, what I liked, what I didn't like, and whether I'd recommend it.

Of course, in the course of writing this up, I mostly ended up formulating ridiculous conspiracy theories. But hey, that shouldn't prevent me from releasing the beta of ThatKid Book Reviews:

Title: Charlie Wilson's War

Author: George Crile

Tags: Non-fiction, Cold War, Afghanistan, CIA, Commies, Jihadists, Hind Helicopter, Texas, Military-Industrial Complex, Middle East, Congressmen Who Drink Too Much and Wage Wars With US Taxpayer Dollars Without Really Having The Legal Authority To Do So

If someone asked you to make a slide called "Key Takeaways," it would contain the following information: The CIA was waging war on the Soviet Union through proxies in Afghanistan for the better part of the 1980s. United States of Freedom led a multinational effort to arm the Afghan resistance movement and teach those Soviet Commie Bastards a lesson or two. The Cold War wasn't so long ago, and there were people at the highest levels of the US government who really seemed to hate communists. Like a lot. (Man, doesn't the Cold War seem completely archaic and silly just 15 years after the fact? Almost in a category with phrenology and alchemy and things like that.) Also, there were lots of people involved in the United States of Freedom government who were more than happy to stick to the Russkies for perceived slights in re: the Vietnam war.

If I Could Meet Any Of The Featured Players: and it isn't like I didn't find the title character (Congressman Wilson) intriguing (in a good ole boy drinking binge sort of way), but Gust Avrakotos, "The Blue-Collar James Bond," is just too much. Too, too much.

The Super-Interesting Factoids That I'm Looking Forward To Dropping On People In Casual Conversation That I Imagine Will Make Me Sound Smart: Israel was shipping weapons to Pakistan to help Muslim jihadists defeat our Communist enemies. A member of Congress could fly around the world buying weapons (and we're talking hundreds and hundreds of millions of taxpayers' dollars) to arm a foreign army because he thought it would be a good idea to stick it to the Commies (see above). Apparently, Ollie North was something of a radical compared to these guys, which doesn't mean these guys weren't radicals; it means that Ollie North was a war-mongering lunatic.

What I Still Want To Know: I get that the book is about the 80s and the Cold War, etc etc, and I've certainly felt empowered to draw my own conclusions in re: the ironies inherent in the fact that we gave the Afghans gazillions of dollars worth of weapons and training and then ended up fighting them ten years later, but I could definitely use an entire book connecting Charlie Wilson and his nonsense to the fact that we're still involved in a war in that part of the world, only we've replaced our Communist enemies with our Muslim enemies. I would like to know a lot more about how all that went down, and precisely which dudes who were our boys in the 80s ended up involved in the recent unpleasantness. The author gives you a couple pages on this, but not nearly enough. Also, and this is really out of left field, but I'd like to know who's arming the insurgency in Iraq right now. That is, if the Russkies were helping the Vietnamese, and we were helping the Afghans, who's using Iraq to fight a proxy war against us and make our lives difficult? Is it completely crazy to think that maybe the Chinese are involved? Am I being ridiculously paranoid? (Or just my normal level of paranoia?)

Are They Going To Make a Movie?: Yes. I didn't know until after I finished the book. Apparently Tom Hanks is going to play Charlie Wilson. That certainly earns an enthusiastic "Perhaps!" Maybe this choice of role is a signal that Tom Hanks is ready to begin his inevitable march towards being the actual President of the United States. And don't act like that couldn't happen. If it sounds odd to think that an actor could be President, remind yourself that this already happened, 25 years ago, and that first guy didn't have anything close to Tom Hanks' marketing appeal or Academy Awards (and no, I won't be putting the little TM there -- take that, Academy!). Anyhoo, enough about Tom Hanks.

So I Should I Read It? Oh definitely. I mean, you should be able to skip through some of it (there's maybe 40 percent too much attention paid to CIA office politics); if you needed to get through it in a hurry, I would read mostly the parts that don't take place in Washington. Except for the parts where Charlie Wilson does funny things like get in drunk-driving accidents or go too far with his womanizing. Those parts are pretty amusing.

Yeah, so that's it. I think I'll try it a couple more times and maybe make it a regular feature. Feedback is, of course, very appreciated.

Posted by thatkid at December 4, 2005 10:26 AM under Book Report , The Papers

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