It is nice that Hollyweird made a movie where the Russians were the bad guys. However, this movie was made about 20 years after everyone else had already figured that out.

At this rate, about 20 years after the Iranians overthrow the ayatollahs and hang Ahmadinejad from the nearest lamp post, maybe we’ll get a movie showing jihadis as they really are too, of course, by that time, we’ll get a Michael Moore movie about how much of a paradise it is to live in North Korea, complete with kite flying.

Succinctly put. The reason we sent guns and not books is because books wouldn’t have defeated the Soviets. And if we had built schools after the Soviets left, all it would have meant is that the Taliban had the nicest Madrassas on the continent courtesy of the US taxpayers.

I reject the notion that we have to bribe every nation on earth with social programs in order for them to leave us alone. The threat that we will come there and kill them if they don’t is sufficient.

And look how peace, prosperity, love, and tolerance have broken out in those places.

So try to imagine, during the 1992 presidential campaign, candidates trying to tell the public we had to pump some big bucks into Afghanistan, along with a major military commitment. Without some serious firepower support anyone we sent to try to oppose the Taliban via education would have been killed off in short order.

Such has always been the way of things. Victory has followup costs but the voters are rarely willing to pay. The reconstruction of Europe and Japan following WWII is one of the rare times the victors got it right.

Early in the movie there is a superfluous dig at the Christian right to establish Wilson’s liberal bona fides but Sorkin seems to get most of it our his system then. There is a dig at Stansfield Turner but not a single mention of Jimmy Carter and the foreign policy flaccidity that led to the Soviet invasion of Afganistan. The passivity of the intelligence and diplomatic establishment Sorkin tries to conflate with Ronald Reagan (a neat mental trick).

Hoffman’s character as a tough real spy in conflict with the namby pamby bureaucrats is reminiscent of how much Hollywood liberals admire anti-ACLU, anti-Miranda cops as fictional characters but despise them in reality. It was also amazing to see the Soviets portrayed as bad guys without nuance, qualification or wordy moral equivalence. Liberals like Sorkin did not do that while that war was going on. Better late than never.

It is a very solidly enjoyable flick. I hope it is successful.