# Charlie Wilson's War

**URL:** <https://boards.straightdope.com/t/charlie-wilsons-war/430988>\
**Category:** Cafe Society\
**Created:** [December 23, 2007, 2:33am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/charlie-wilsons-war/430988 "2007-12-23T02:33:13Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Page:** 2

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**Author:** ![Baldwin](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/baldwin/32/7264_2.png) [@Baldwin](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Baldwin)\
**Post date:** [January 8, 2008, 12:46am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/charlie-wilsons-war/430988/21 "2008-01-08T00:46:16Z")

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[QUOTE=Exapno Mapcase]  
Julia Roberts did little more than a cameo and was unconvincing at best. Her whole part could easily have been excised without hurting the movie. Why does this woman care about Pakistan? Who knows? Who cares?  
[/QUOTE]  
Quite a bit more than a cameo. How could you tell this story and leave out Joanne Herring? And we don’t have to wonder; she was interested in Pakistan because she believed (and still does, in her 70s) that (I’m not making this up) “a benign dictatorship is sometimes a necessary stepping stone on the way to democracy”, and she applied this to Pinochet, Franco, the Shah, and Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq, military dictator of Pakistan from 1977 to 1988. If she thought all these motherfuckers were _benign_ dictators, I guess the bar isn’t very high. (And didn’t Chile kinda already have democracy when they elected Allende?) The woman is amazing, in a horrifying way.

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