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Sidney Pollack, Scott McClellan, and the Wars for Oil
By Bernard Weiner (about the author) Page 1 of 3 page(s)
For OpEdNews: Bernard Weiner - Writer
OK, let's connect the dots: The Iraq War & Occupation. Scott McClellan's memoir. The death of film director Sydney Pollack.
When I heard about the death of Pollack last week, I happened coincidentally to be rewatching one of his earliest films, from 1971, "Three Days of the Condor." In it, Robert Redford plays a bookish CIA analyst who survives the mass-murder of his entire unit because he was "out to lunch," literally and figuratively. The rest of the movie involves Redford (codename "Condor") staying one step ahead of the assassins sent to get him while he tries desperately to figure out what the hell is going on.
All Condor knows is that somehow there's a CIA plot involving areas around the globe where three distinct languages are spoken: Spanish, Dutch and Arabic. By the end of the film, and remember that it was made in 1971, he finally has it figured out: The three regions where those languages are spoken -- the Middle East, Latin America, and former Dutch colonies in the Pacific and East Africa -- possess huge untapped oil reserves, and the U.S. wants to ensure that it will have effective control of those energy resources far into the future. To do so, it will stop at nothing, including violent or non-violent regime changes abroad and hiding its motives from the American citizenry at home, even if doing so requires assassinating its own researchers and agents.
Certainly, in addition to CIA analysts, there were a number of officials, authors and journalists in 1971 who had been thinking and writing about the long-range strategic role of oil in world affairs, and the humongous profits to be made from its extraction. Everyone knows the value of black gold now, but most American citizens at that time were in the dark about the potential economic and political ramifications of U.S. oil policy: the propping-up of dictators and governments friendly to the U.S., wars and occupations when deemed necessary, the massive corruption that would emerge, the environmental degradation associated with oil extraction, oil as a political tool by OPEC countries and the possibility of quick-rising prices at the pump, etc.
In recent years, Hollywood & TV have spun off a few commercial features that center around the economic and military ramifications of the U.S. trying to control oil/gas reserves around the globe ("Syriana," "Oil Storm," "The Deal," etc. ). But 35-plus years ago, all this was sub rosa. Sydney Pollack, with "Three Days of the Condor," was one of the first Hollywood directors to lift up the rock and permit us to smell the dangerous stench of energy-greed and rapacious power roiling underneath. R.I.P., Mr. Pollack.
SCOTT McCLELLAN'S REVELATIONS
The Scott McClellan flap is almost silly. The mainstream media is shocked, shocked!,to learn from the former White House press secretary that Bush and Cheney and Rove lied and deceived to lead America into invading and occupying oil-rich Iraq. And that they lied and deceived about having outed a CIA agent in political retaliation for her husband having revealed that the Administration had lied and deceived America into invading and occupying Iraq.
And the mainstream media is shocked, shocked!, to learn from McClellan's memoir that the mainstream media were cheerleaders -- "complicit enablers" is McClellan's term -- for the Bush Administration's plan to invade and occupy Iraq. Who, us? This helps explain the mass-media's current virtual silence about the recent revelation that the Pentagon sent out scores of ex-military officers disguised as "independent consultants" to hype the Administration's talking points daily in the mass-media about the absolute necessity to rush to war against Iraq. No wonder it's CYA time.
Of course, McClellan downplays his own role in the deaths and maiming of several hundred thousand human beings in Iraq: our troops and Iraq's insurgents and civilians. True, the mass-media corporations were all too willing to act as stenographers for the CheneyBush spin rather than do much digging on their own, but it was McClellan who was among the chief White House dissemblers in helping create the atmosphere of lies and deceit that aided the mass-media in its "enabling" function. In short, there's blood all over his hands.
Finally, the mainstream media is shocked, shocked!, to learn from McClellan's book that practically every action taken by the CheneyBush White House was done for partisan political reasons, not necessarily for the good of the American people.
THE FACTS WERE OUT THERE
Why is all this flap "silly"? Because anybody paying even half-attention to what's gone down in the past seven-plus years knew long ago about all this mendacity, moral corruption, media-enabling, and partisan machinations. A few respected sources in the mass-media and many analysts in the foreign press and on the internet were asking the right questions and revealing the truths behind Administration lies. So the facts were out there if you knew where to look.
And certainly McClellan wasn't the first CheneyBush insider to reveal embarrassing nuggets.
In addition to Richard Clarke and Tom Ridge and David Kuo spilling insider beans about what was really going on, how can we forget former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill revealing that he was amazed and puzzled at his first Cabinet meetings in 2001 by the amount of time devoted to the topic of attacking Iraq. It didn't make sense. Saddam Hussein was isolated, contained, Iraq had no WMD to speak of (both Rice and Powell said as much at the time). Why the big rush to war?
www.crisispapers.org
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