To the Victor Go the Oils  

Grist has an excellent review of Syriana which opened in the US recently, although it hasn't made its way down here yet (Super G at the Oil Drum has also posted his thoughts on the movie, as have Mobjectivist and Digby).

The movie is neither a melodrama nor a didactic sermon about the evils of Big Oil, but an almost obsessive work of observation. It contains a wealth of detail, reflecting Gaghan's meticulous research (drawing heavily on See No Evil, the tell-all book by ex-CIA agent Robert Baer). Milieus most Westerners know only from media caricature -- the debauched underground nightclubs of Tehran, the madrassas of Pakistan, the inner warrens of Beirut, the palaces of Middle Eastern emirs -- are depicted here with an unflashy documentary realism.

More than anything, Gaghan seems eager simply to show us: here it is. All that stuff you've heard so much about, the subject of so much charged rhetoric and political grandstanding: here are those people and places. Take a look.

There isn't a false note struck along the way, but special notice must be given to George Clooney, whose jaunty charisma is utterly submerged under a scruffy beard, paunchy gut, and morose mien. Clooney's CIA agent is slowly becoming aware that he's a relic of a former age, soon to be discarded, and the actor carries the weight with quiet, understated accuracy. After Good Night, And Good Luck and Syriana, Clooney has shaken his playboy image -- or at least enriched it -- by becoming a champion of serious, socially conscious cinema.

Over a Barrel

Grist readers will no doubt be curious about the environmental lessons of the movie. They may be disappointed to hear that there aren't any, at least in the traditional sense. There is no mention, even in passing, of global warming or air pollution.

I don't know if this is deliberate, but regardless, it serves as an indirect illustration of what I took to be Syriana's central message, which might be summarized thusly:

There is only the fight for resources.

All else is ephemera: The rule of law in the U.S. Transparent democratic government. International treaties. Reform in the Middle East. Even our most cherished ideals, our most personal relationships. These are bourgeois preoccupations that crumble like dust when they come between the powerful nations of the world and the resources that fuel them. Oil is running out, and the only law left is the law of the jungle.

...

There is an odd and rather glaring omission. Gaghan follows a long, grim chain of greed, corruption, and deceit, but he doesn't trace it to its terminus: the folks using the oil. Us. The viewers of his movie. Conspicuous U.S. consumption serves as his unquestioned backdrop -- and his silence about us ultimately reveals his fatalism about the fortunes of democracy.

Is there really so little spark left in the American experiment that public acquiescence to escalating global resource struggles is a fait accompli? There's no chance we could self-organize to use less, and twist the arms of our elected representatives until they help us? Are we so apathetic, so powerless?

I'm not ready to give up that hope. Not yet.

Digby's post is worth reading as it stresses one important aspect of the movie - it may make more people aware of what Iraq is really about. He also asks a question which is one I'm fond of posing (though i don't know the answer) - what would happen if the reality of the situation was expressed clearly to everyone instead of being hidden under endless layers of nonsense ?

The powers that be in the US (and the United Kingdom of British Petroleum) believe they must control this region's valuable resource. Indeed, some of the big thinkers like Zbigniew Brzezinski (in "The Grand Chessboard") and the PNAC nuts believe that the US must control "Eurasia" or risk being shut out of the future. There is nothing new under the sun and the pursuit of precious necessary resources that belong to others has been going on forever.

Oil is certainly not the only reason we are in this mess. It is, perhaps, the fundamental reason we are in this mess. And it's the reason that this mess isn't going to be solved by either bringing the boys home or creating a "democracy" in the middle east. We may leave Iraq as an occupying force due to a lack of domestic support, or we might be chased from the region by violent events. But if we have any illusions that the United States is not going to be deeply involved in the middle east for the forseeable future, we need to wake up. Sadly, whether we know it or not, by our blind and profligate actions the American people lend credence to the insane ramblings of that miniskirted harpy, Ann Coulter:

"Why not go to war just for oil? We need oil."

Why not, indeed? I wonder what would happen if the question was posed just that starkly? At this point, the Great Game players, the oil companies and the politicians who dance to their tune are unwilling to put it that way. They work to keep citizens in the dark about what is at stake, encouraging them to guzzle cheap gasoline at a fantastic pace while droning out messianic statements about good and evil and spreading freedom.

Syriana's "confusing" plot speaks to that. It's conveys the sense of drugged vagueness we all feel when we try to unravel the motivations behind these actions. There are a thousand different reasons why we could be doing what we are doing, but nobody knows for sure what is the real one.

There is only one character in the film who holds all the disparate threads in his hands --- the James Baker (Christopher Plummer) character who walks freely among the politicians, the oil companies, the ruling sheiks, the spooks and the regional puppets. He is the Grand Master of the Great Game. He ensures that none of the players know what the others are doing, each kept in the dark, flailing about with everything from torture to idealism to pragmatic everyday power politics without ever knowing that they are being manipulated by greater forces.

I suppose that we could prosaically assume that he represents a worldly reality like The Carlyle Group (or in an earlier time, The Trilateral Commission.) But I think he simply symbolises Power and Arrogance. He is fundamentally anti-democratic, amoral and relentless in his quest for more of what he is made of. He is America's id, perfectly represented as an elderly Texan with his steely talons dug deeply into every consequential player in the New Great Game.

The only character who sees through the subterfuge is the ex-CIA agent, abandoned by his country, whose life of dirty deeds on behalf of The Company prepares him alone to understand his role and dig his way out. That is the most out-of-sync Hollywood moment in an otherwise completely cynical film. (But then, it's George Clooney who can't help but be seen as a hero.) In reality, there can be no such neat denouement. The claws would turn deadly if he were to do what he does.

I've read a number of reviews in which the writer finds this movie a simple-minded portrayal of evil corporate masters holding the puppet strings of great nations and vast empires. It's the same complaint about the slogan "No blood for oil", as if those who see our presence in the mideast in such terms are silly dupes and fools. But I would submit that it is the jaded sophisticates who are missing the point. "Syriana", for all its "confusion" really does get to the heart of the matter and forces you to deal with the one simple fact that nobody wants to accept. This planet really is running out of oil --- and we are entering an era in which our nation is going to be asserting our power to get it.

Rather than finding "Syriana's" plot confounding, by the end I thought its multiple plotlines led to a bracing clarity: Oil. I don't know that it's all that important to understand anything else and if America sees this movie and comes away with that understanding then I think it succeeds as both a film and a political statement.

George Clooney also has an interview in this weekend's Sydney Morning Herald, where he talks about Syriana and his other new movie "Good Night and Good Luck" which opens here next weekend (though I was lucky enough to score a preview ticket from Crikey so I'm off to watch it tomorrow).

The triumph of the Clooney star persona is clearest in the press discussion of his films, which are invariably described as mainstream. The first film he directed was Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, a challenging, inconclusive story of a TV game-show host who may or may not have been a spy. And there is nothing mainstream about Good Night, and Good Luck, a black-and-white film that meticulously describes a small political episode that took place more than 50 years ago.

Clooney is in it, but almost unrecognisable behind glasses and acquired jowls, as television producer Fred Friendly. Murrow is played (with uncanny verisimilitude) by David Strathairn, an art-house actor known chiefly for his work with maverick director John Sayles.

No one plays McCarthy; his presence is suggested through the clever use of historical footage. "As George has said, if you had to hire an actor today to play Joseph R. McCarthy, no one would ever believe in him, because he would be too vaudevillian, too monstrous," Strathairn says. Like Murrow, who decided the best way to deal with McCarthy's politics of hate was to get him on air so people could hear what he was really like, Clooney wanted him to be a victim of his own words. That is certainly not the sort of thing you find in a mainstream film. Hollywood would have them going head to head.

Good Night, and Good Luck - the words were Murrow's signature sign-off - has won prizes at the Venice and New York film festivals, which is not surprising, but even the chatroom crowd, mostly teenagers with a weakness for action, are transfixed by it.

The US reviews have been rapturous. "The most compelling American movie of the year so far," Newsweek said. The Village Voice saw it not only as a wake-up call to the media, but to a memory of civilised values.

It depicts, wrote Michael Atkinson, "a more sophisticated yesteryear [that may be] something of an eye-opener for culturati born since the Nixon administration, for whom an anchorman who speaks in multiple clauses, who quotes from Shakespeare and whose basic righteousness dictated his actions is as familiar as a politician with respect for his constituents".

Next up is Syriana. "Wait until you see it," Clooney says. "This film is like a little ice-cream and Syriana is the steak." Is it political? "Oh, my God!" says Clooney, grinning mischievously.

The production company, Section Eight, he formed with Steven Soderbergh is behind Syriana, the first film by Traffic screenwriter Stephen Gaghan, which is a thriller about the intrigues in the oil industry. Clooney plays a character based on CIA agent Robert Baer, who wrote the book on which the film is based.

Controversially, the script parallels its account of intrigue at the big-money end of oil with a sympathetic view of a burgeoning terrorist in Pakistan. It has been screening in the US for the past fortnight and seems to be attracting just as much enthusiasm as Good Night, and Good Luck. "It shakes us up and prompts us to question world policies," said a USA Today critic. "We need more movies like this." No wonder Clooney insists that the political tide is slowly turning in the US.

Moving away from a dramatised account of the oil wars to a real one, Jeff Vail has an interesting post on his fear of fusion (which probably isn't a particularly common malady) which includes an interesting snippet of his experiences seizing Iraqi oil infrastructure during the invasion.

I will admit that I am more than a little eager to see the peak of oil come and go. Because when it does, if nothing else, it will prevent the development of a fusion, a modern "Pharo Maker" as i've written about before in "Energy, Society & Hierarchy."

Coincidentally, take a look at the cover graphic on Amidon's JFQ article. Despite what the caption says, the cover graphic is one of the offshore Gas & Oil terminals in the al-Faw complex. It was one of the least-publicized operations of the Iraq War, but the very first land operation was a seizure of two of these platforms, as well as three other key oil infrastructure installations in al-Faw by a Seal Team 3 and the Royal Marines' 40th Commando Brigade. My role in it was relatively small: I planned the electronic warfare component, consisting of jamming support from EC-130H Compass Call and E/A-6B Prowlers to ensure that the SEAL assault on the offshore platforms would not tip off the Iraqi land forces in Al Faw of the coming invasion, even though they hit the platforms about 2o minutes before the Royal Marines hit the beach.

What did strike me as interesting about the operation was how aggressively it was marketed as an effort to prevent an environmental disaster, because by capturing the oil infrastructure before the Iraqis could sabotage it would, of course, avert a major oil spill in the Gulf. So, naturally, given the Bush administration's strong environmental credentials, it was worth the lives of the dozens of US/UK forces killed in the "unexpectedly fierce" resistance in Um Qasr (because we used up our one time shot at a surprise operation in al-Faw) in order to prevent an oil spill. Sure thing boss, whatever you say...

I'll close with a snippet from Crikey which I would just dismiss as idle speculation except that it follows on from a similar (but slightly more generalised) prediction made by the Kokoda Foundation in recent months - about the possibility of Australian involvement in a land war in China.

Hugo Kelly writes:

Today's announcement that Australian troops will stay in Iraq to protect the Japanese contingent will soak up the headlines. But some more significant defence strategy happened last week when Defence Minister Hill let it be known the government would be expanding the army by 2500 to form "armoured groups." He set a target date, for what is essentially a major re-armament, of 2012.

The significance here is that it has been unofficially known for some time that the USA expects, in the event of a war with China, that Australia will contribute an armoured division to the invasion of mainland China.

As Australia did not have anything approaching an armoured division, this was not considered an overly likely scenario.

But if Defence does achieve this build up, and scrape together everything they plan to have (and this is Defence, so we won't be holding our breath) by 2012, then it might just pass muster as at least a mechanised division.

So last week Robert Hill was effectively setting a 2012 re-armament date for a war with China. Wars tend to arrive a few years before the target re-armament dates, so our Defence source advises us to get out of the Shanghai real-estate market by around 2009.

I really hope these predictions aren't accurate - how on earth does anyone plan fighting a land war against a nuclear power ?

The obvious interpretation if you look at it with peak oil lenses on is that the US may be anticipating some Chinese resistance to having their oil flow throttled back in the event global production does start declining (in some ways that would be an echo of the start of the Pacific part of World War II, when Japan had its oil flow cut off).

No doubt most people would consider this reasoning tinfoil but I can't think of a more likely explanation off hand (suggestions are welcome), as I doubt the Chinese would deliberately provoke a war by invading Taiwan and to a certain extent I'm not sure it would be worth fighting over if they did (though the bastards should Free Tibet, as I've grumpily noted before, as it was never part of China).

On a final note, I'll randomly add that the conspiracy theory world has a special place in its heart for the year 2012, as there are all sorts of predictions that 2012 is the year the world ends. This belief seems to originate with the Mayans, whose calendar didn't extend beyond 2012 for that reason (the last day is December 21, for those of a millenialist disposition who like to fixate on exact dates).