Charlie Wilson vs the Zohan

We recently watched *Charlie Wilson's War*. I thought about another American movie from the past year which also dealt with foreign politics -- Adam Sandler's *Don't Mess with the Zohan*. Charlie Wilson's War pretends to thoughtfulness, but it's the Zohan which has a responsible political message.

From the beginning of Charlie Wilson's War, I was shocked. That the US should intervene (covertly) in Afghanistan is treated as having been obvious at the time; all who were against simply preferred to pretend the problem didn't exist. Charlie Wilson is portrayed as the one person in Washington who took up this task responsibly. After all, the film repeats, why should poorly armed Afghans fight "our war" against the Soviet Union? (The film of course never touches on what happened before 1980 or prior US activities in Afghanistan.) So Wilson gets weapons to the mujahideen and by the late 1980s they are wrecking havoc on the evil Soviets.

What happens next is tacked on as merely an after thought. Only once the Soviets have been dealt with do the major players recognize that there could be some unintended effects. Oops, the mujahideen turn into the Taleban. Oh well, that's not Wilson's fault -- he fought the right war. In the end, Wilson is neatly absolved of these consequences. In fact, subsequent events in Afghanistan are written off as accident by reference to the Chinese idiom about an old man and a young boy who gets a horse. The suggested logic is that one could not have predicted how prior actions affect the future. In the case of US activities in Afghanistan, that is patently false. One didn't have to wait until 1990 to realize that arming the mujahideen would have consequences for the political landscape in Afghanistan.

How can a film that supposed to be serious treatment of a foreign policy issue portray this guy as a hero whose only vice was being a party animal? Isn't this film the exact opposite of what America needs? The country has lacked responsible, far-sighted foreign policy. While pretending to bring us back to important issues, the film is really an exercise in national forgetting.

Zohan, on the other hand, makes no pretentions to being a serious political film. At many points, it's not particularly funny and very much a canned story -- boy meets girl who is supposed to be his enemy but they overcome the odds. What is fresh is that the boy is Israeli and the girl Palestinian. That a Jewish American would put this issue up front, and treat it this way, is really something new in Hollywood. Of course, Israeli-Palestinian relations are portrayed in a cartoon-like way (the main problem is the two groups don't like each other, not complicated issues like land rights and so forth). But the message is clear: all parties would be better off if this conflict were resolved.

And it's this kind of message that America needs to hear. Ultimately, Zohan is a far more responsible film than Charlie Wilson's War. Who would have thought that an Israeli secret service man-turned hair dresser would make a more valuable contribution to US political culture than a portrait of a congressman?