THINGS I LEARNED ABOUT FOREIGN POLICY FROM WATCHING SYRIANA
jim geraghty reporting
TKS
(Warning: This posting contains spoilers. If you’ve already seen Syriana, or if you have no intention of seeing the movie, read onward. If you still plan on see it and want to try to understand the Byzantine plot and ADD pacing on your own pace, skip this post.)
* The CIA regularly conducts operations that put surface-to-air missiles in the hands of Iranian terrorists, with no backup plan.
* Blue-eyed Egyptian terrorists who don’t speak Farsi often go to Tehran, without a translator, to pick up said surface-to-air missiles.
* The FBI regularly investigates whether the CIA has killed Iranian citizens in the course of said operations. Because, you know, they don’t have much else on their plate.
* The Middle East is full of Oxford and Georgetown-educated Arab princes who want to establish democracy and women’s rights. Because these princes – the epitome of what America wants to see in the region - won’t make deals with American oil companies, the CIA often sets out to kill them.
* When a CIA agent played by George Clooney threatens to murder the wife and child of the head of a law firm who opposes him, it’s the smooth menace of a tough guy hero in a tough guy world. When U.S. oil companies make bribes to Kazakistani officials to secure the rights to an oil field, it’s corruption so heinous that the audience is supposed to cringe. No scorn is left over for the Kazakistani officials who actually take the bribes.
* Hezbollah is an honorable neighborhood watch program that intervenes when the local thugs are torturing an American. Kind of like Spider-man with a turban.
* Iranians are bad guys, although we never really get any sense of why. An American group called the “Committee to Liberate Iran,” however, is really sinister, because they have lots of old white guys and they associate with the oil company executives.
* The “Committee to Liberate Iran” and the unseen, unnamed President are dangerous and reckless because they want to remake Middle Eastern countries, named and unnamed, and establish democracy, rule of law, and women’s rights. Our handsome sheik, formerly known as the doctor from Deep Space Nine, is noble and heroic because he wants to remake his Middle Eastern country and establish democracy, rule of law, and women’s rights – on his own schedule, not America’s. It’s all in the timing, apparently.
* If you lay off a group of Pakistani oil field workers, at least two of them will become terrorists, because unemployment causes terrorism.
* Big, rich, powerful badguys are always, always, always racist.
* Obviously, this movie makes huge, huge changes from Bob Baer’s book. However, of all the changes, I can only imagine the meeting when the producers said, “We love your life story, Bob, but we think the ending might be stronger if you die at the end.”
We’re supposed to be quite horrified by this whole mosaic of corruption, but the movie offers no hints as to what exactly the solution is/ought to be.
Writing in the December 7 New York Times, Caryn James noted
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“while its political attitude is unmistakable -– that the American need for oil shamefully depends on Middle East chaos –- [Syriana]’s fleshed-out characters never lecture the audience.”
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Uh, no. Our need for oil doesn’t depend on Middle East chaos. Middle East chaos makes the oil business riskier, and consequently, less profitable. If the Middle East were stable, oil companies wouldn’t need to pay as much as they currently do for insurance, and/or security. They wouldn’t have to worry about al-Qaeda blowing up their refineries, pipelines or tankers, nor would they have to worry about a Khomeni-esque revolution starting up and seizing their property.
If our policy were as oil-centered as these folks argue, we would have lifted sanctions on Saddam-era Iraq a long time ago and left him in place, free to rule and terrorize his people as he preferred. We would have full trade with Iran, and we would give Hugo Chavez and any other dictator sitting on oil reserves the thumbs up. We probably would cut our ties to Israel, since it’s just a headache and sticking point when dealing with oil-rich countries from Saudi Arabia to the Gulf States to Iran. We would keep our mouths shut over genocide in the Sudan.
The central assumption in “Syriana” is that there are heroic Arab reformers out there just waiting to take the reigns of their countries, and turn them into Hollywood’s idea of a free country – and that the main threat to these reformers isn’t Islamist extremists, nor Baathists, nor monarchies unwilling to relinquish power, nor theocrats like Iran’s mullahs. No, to Hollywood, the biggest obstacle to a freer, more stable, peaceful Middle East is American oil companies and the C.I.A.
tks.nationalreview.com |
