A funny thing happened on the way to the "quagmire" in Iraq....

It didn't happen.

Which explains quite a bit. The polls show that most Americans are opposed to the war in general. The mantra of the left about this war being wrong, illegal, and a quagmire has had it's effect, but still..... we see no mass demonstrations daily on college campuses. The White House is not surrounded every day by thousands of anti war protesters.

Other than the occasional freak show by groups like Code Pink, the American people don't say much about the war. Why? If they are against it and want our boys home now, why? It's very simple.

We want to win.

We want to be able to say that we not only defeated Saddam, but the radical Islamists that wants Iraq for their own. We listened to Gen. Petraeus. We shifted through the liberal media and we saw progress. We understand that Pelosi and Reid don't seem to eager to end it all at once either, and we understand that they may be more at stake than we realize.

Which brings me to the movie I watched Saturday night. I finally saw "Charlie Wilson's War." It's about our arming the Afghans in the 80's to fight the Red Army of the Russians. For years I have heard from lefties about how we armed what is now the Taliban in the 80's. "Charlie Wilson's War" was Hollywood's delightful entertaining way of making this point. It's a favorite talking point of the left. But what I got out of the movie was a bit different than what my lefty friends wanted me too.

At the end of the movie Charlie Wilson goes to Congress to get money to build schools in Afghanistan after the war. He makes the point that half the population in Afghanistan is under the age of 14 and they won't remember that we were the good guys. He is told that no one cares about schools in Afghanistan and he does not get the money. Then at the very end of the movie the CIA guy that has been helping Charlie tells him about Taliban coming into Afghanistan and it does not bode well for us.

Charlie's last line written on the screen in the movie says this:

"These things happened. They were glorious and they changed the world.

.......and then we f**ked up the end game."

Now, the left wanted to make their point that the Taliban in Afghanistan was our fault and that we armed them in the 80's. We screwed up.

Now look at the last lines of "Charlie Wilson's War" and see how it relates to the Iraq War. In both wars we defeated a very bad enemy, but in Afghanistan in the 80's.......we left.

We left before the job was done. We left the Afghan people hanging and left them to radical Islamists.

I think you see where I am going with this.

The point that was made, but certainly not meant to be made by Hollywood, was that we can't just leave Iraq like we did Afghanistan. We must stay and make sure it is stabilized. We must continue to build schools. In other words, we must maintain a presence there so the Iraqi children will not be taken in by radical Islamists and that they will know that we were the good guys.

In other words, and forgive me for using Charlie Wilson's terminology, let's not f**k up the end game this time.

Very good movie, btw.