It’s a relief that none of the current crop of Hollywood’s west-flagellating, terrorist-sanitising hate-movies – Paradise Now, Munich, Syriana -- won best picture at the Oscars. Charles Krauthammer hits the nail on the head about Syriana’s moral and political illiteracy:

The political hero is the Arab prince who wants to end corruption, inequality and oppression in his country. As he tells his tribal elders, he intends to modernize his country by bringing the rule of law, market efficiency, women's rights and democracy. What do you think happens to him? He, his beautiful wife and beautiful children are murdered, incinerated, by a remote-controlled missile, fired from CIA headquarters in Langley, no less — at the very moment that (this passes for subtle cross-cutting film editing) his evil younger brother, the corrupt rival to the throne and puppet of the oil company, is being hailed at a suitably garish 'oilman of the year' celebration populated by fat and ugly Americans. What is grotesque about this moment of plot clarity is that the overwhelmingly obvious critique of actual U.S. policy in the real Middle East today concerns America's excess of Wilsonian idealism in trying to find and promote — against a tide of tyranny, intolerance and fanaticism — local leaders like the Good Prince.

While Amir Taheri points out how the market for national and cultural self-loathing into which Syriana taps is acting as a potent recruiting sergeant for the war against the west:

I received more than a dozen emails from Arab friends throughout the Middle East citing the film as, in the word of one of them, another ‘sure proof’ that the US will never tolerate democratic leaders in that neck of the wood... The fact that the CIA is little more than a costly leaking device used by rival groups within the US establishment to lurch accusations and counter accusations at each other need not bother the makers of ‘Syriana’...

The self-loathing party in the US would do well to ponder the above mentioned second part of the quotation from Waugh: ‘The more elaborate the society the more vulnerable it is to attack, and the more complete its collapse in case of defeat.’

I agree totally with all these points. And yet, when I saw Syriana at the weekend, I had a slightly different reaction. The message of the film, that the oil companies form an axis of corruption at the centre of which squats the CIA and which has a vested interest in frustrating moves to democracy in the Arab world, is clearly a morally inverted agitprop attack on Bush’s America, and as ludicrous as its other message that human bomb warfare is caused by unemployment. And yet, if you pare away the partisan politics, the message that the combination of big oil and politics has had a lethal impact on global order is surely correct. It’s just that the film miscasts the principal villains and victims. After all, why else has Israel been left to swing in the genocidal wind for more than fifty years if not for the fact that oil runs global politics? Why else was Saudi Arabia indulged by the US, even while the oil-soaked kingdom was busy creating the Wahhabi threat to world peace, if not through the close connections with the Saudi oil princes? And so on.

Peter Nolan and Sacha Kumaria in the Sunday Times explain this conundrum by pointing out that Syriana grossly misses the point of the book upon which it is based: 'See No Evil', the memoirs of a CIA veteran, Bob Baer. His book describes how weak leadership, bureaucratic infighting and corruption left the terrorists to go unpunished and blinded America to the rising threat of Al-Qaeda. The point is, however, that this was an attack upon the Clinton White House:

The movie’s slogan, ‘Everything is connected’, belies the film’s main failing: that it is not at all reflective of the contents of Baer’s book, which describes how he saw the Clinton White House put out the welcome mat for the very dirtiest people in the oil business in return for campaign donations and fat payments to the president’s cronies. Roger Tamraz, then a fugitive from an outstanding Interpol arrest warrant for fraud, got to pitch his plan for an oil pipeline face-to-face with Bill Clinton over coffee in the Oval Office. He began his career, Baer tells us, by working to channel millions of dollars in kickbacks from an oil pipeline deal to Kamal Adham, the long-time head of Saudi intelligence, and went on to partner everyone from the Sicilian mafia to Colonel Gadaffi of Libya. Another notorious businessman benefiting from Clinton’s interventions was the commodity broker Marc Rich, who spent over a decade on the run from American justice before Clinton pardoned him just before leaving office.

Instead of depicting this history, we get a political fairytale pushing the anti-business agenda of Clooney and Stephen Gaghan, Syriana’s writer and director. Imagine if the story of the journalists who investigated Richard Nixon’s cover-up of Watergate, All the President’s Men, had been filmed to show Jimmy Carter as the villain and you might get some idea of the liberties they take with the facts.

Syriana portrays the giant American oil companies as villains, a collection of crude Texas cowboys who cheerfully admit to bribery while presenting themselves as patriots and Christians. The international middlemen, wheeler-dealers like Tamraz and Rich, who operate with shell companies, post office boxes and a complete lack of scruples, are conspicuous by their absence. The tragedy of the film is the missed opportunity it represents. Clooney and Gaghan are right to recognise corruption in the oil industry. But by attempting to score domestic political points they miss the bigger picture.

In the cartoon world of Bush-hating luvviedom, of course, Bill Clinton cannot ever be a villain. Thus our current terrifying predicament is reduced to stereotypes as reassuring to their creators as they are lethal to the rest of us.