Weekend Economists Make War on Charlie Wilson August 22-24, 2014

[Demeter]

33. How Joanne Herring won Charlie Wilson's War By Philip Sherwell

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1571233/How-Joanne-Herring-won-Charlie-Wilsons-War.html

Joanne Herring was a pampered Texan until she took to the mountains of Afghanistan to fight the Red Menace. As her astonishing story comes to the big screen, she talks to Philip Sherwell

Joanne Herring speaks in the slow, refined drawl of a Southern belle. With her svelte figure, surgeon-assisted features, dyed blonde hair and obligatory sunglasses, she looks far younger than her 78 years, as she drives around Houston's ritzy suburbs in a red Jaguar convertible, accompanied by her two bandana-wearing black poodles. Thrice-married socialite, hostess, philanthropist, businesswoman, diplomat, television chat-show presenter and God-fearing ultra-conservative, Mrs Herring has been compared to a cross between Scarlett O'Hara and Dolly Parton in her various incarnations of Texan royalty. But the most extraordinary role in her remarkable life is about to be portrayed by Julia Roberts in a new Hollywood blockbuster, Charlie Wilson's War, to be released in America on December 21. For Mrs Herring also changed the course of history.

A few months after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, she smuggled herself into that mountainous land to film the atrocities that the Russian forces were inflicting as they strafed villages from helicopter gunships. Mrs Herring nearly became a casualty of those same tactics, surviving a helicopter attack by Soviet forces on their mujahideen foes while she was filming the battle with her combat photographer son, Robin King, and Charles Fawcett, an adventurer and movie-maker. The footage they brought back was pivotal in persuading America to arm secretly and fund the tribal warriors fighting the Red Army. The biggest covert war in history turned Afghanistan into Moscow's "Vietnam", culminating in humiliating defeat for the Kremlin and the collapse of the Soviet Union.

"Many times I wondered what a nice girl from Texas was doing in a place like that," she told The Sunday Telegraph last week. "Never in my wildest dreams would I have thought I would have ended up in the underbelly of the world fighting the demons of communism."

LISTEN TO HER WORDS, AND ASK YOURSELF, HOW IS JOANNE DIFFERENT FROM OSAMA BIN LADIN?

IS IT MEET AND PROPER FOR AMERICAN FOREIGN POLICY TO BE THE PLAYTHING OF SOCIALITES, NO MATTER HOW WELL-INTENTIONED?

SHOULD PRESIDENTS BE LISTENING TO THIS WOMAN, OR TAKING HER MONEY?

SHOULD CONGRESSMEN BE "DATING" HER?

SHE'S DAMN LUCKY THAT THE COLLAPSE OF THE WORLD ECONOMY DISTRACTED ATTENTION AWAY FROM HER EXPLOITS. SHE COULD HAVE ENDED UP LIKE JULIAN ASSANGE....OR EDWARD SNOWDEN, WHO ACTUALLY ARE SERVING THE WORLD AND THE IDEAL OF DEMOCRACY, NOT THEIR GUILT-RIDDEN CONSCIENCES, ADDLED MORALS, AND LUST FOR POWER.