At the risk of being controversial

What would have happened if the leftist reform government that ruled Afghanistan had been helped to remain in power?

The Muslim extremist war against the indigenous Communists started because women were being taught to read, along with other modernizations. How could we have been so short-sighted as to think that dealing a death-blow to the Soviet Union, with which we had had a peaceful, productive detente since Nixon, was so important as to risk creating another Iran? Remember, the events portrayed in this movie happened AFTER Iran. And Iran happened because we overthrew a populist leftist government that had been legitimately and democratically elected in 1954, and installed a brutal dictator, the Shah. The sad truth is, there would be no Muslim extremist governments, or the open terrorist training camps they supply, without American prevention of the rise of local modernization movements.

And what did we get with the collapse of the Soviet Union? Nuclear safety? Hardly. We ended up with a collection of splintered states with gangsters running most of the operations, and no way to know who was securing, and who might actually be making available, refined uranium or even armed nukes. At least with the Soviet Union intact, Mutually Assured Destruction had pretty much ensured that peace between the two superpowers would last indefinitely. Neither nation was institutionally suicidal. Now we have no idea how to keep nukes out of the hands of vengeful, spiteful, stateless extremists who think of themselves as having nothing to lose.

Has our security improved? Do we have more freedom? Have we been able to lower our Cold War military spending to the benefit of the economy? Is our budget balanced? Is our debt shrinking? Is the value of the dollar improving? How many Americans have been killed by Islamist revolutionaries, vs. how many would have been killed by Soviets? This movie, and its publicity campaign, is propaganda, regardless of whether or not it provides a "blowback-friendly" ending. I argue that the obsession with overthrowing socialism wherever it sprouted has left us teetering on the brink of the same disintegration that happened to the Soviet Union. We held out longer because we had more productive strength, but that's no longer true. Our manufacturing sector is below 20% of the economy. We profit by managing the world's money, but economically, we're all hat and no cattle. The dollar is collapsing, and for the simple reason that we hardly make any products, and the fewer products we make, the fewer dollars foreigners need to obtain to purchase them. We're in free-fall.

This movie and the people here who support its premise have it all backwards. The fall of the Soviet Union was the beginning of the end for America. It will take a miracle to prevent it, certainly more than is in the capacity of whatever Democrats are likely to take over next year. We're in serious trouble, and the events depicted in this film, and the motives behind them, explain why.