- Oil Factor
infobox film
film= Oil Factor Behind the War On Terror
genre= dokument
director= Gerard Ungerman, Audray Brohy
produced by= Free-Will Production
editor=
distribution=
premiere=2004
length= 93 minutes
language= English
imdb_id= 0435710
amg_id= 1:323040The Oil Factor is approximately 90 minute
2004 documentary written and directed byGerard Ungerman andAudrey Brohy , narrated byEd Asner . The documentary analyzes the development of some global events since the beginning of the century (especially after the9/11 terrorist attacks ) from the perspective ofoil and oil-abundant regions. The second (or alternative) title of this low-cost film in the "Free-Will production" is: Behind theWar on Terror .The documentary aspires to bring an untraditional point of view over the reasons, aspects and motives of this war and the direction of current US foreign policy.
Interviews
Respondents, featuring in the "Oil Factor", include:
*Zbigniew Brzezinski , former US DoD adviser
*Noam Chomsky , professor atMIT
*Gary Schmitt , executive director of theProject for a New American Century
*Paul Bremer , temporary (Iraq i) coalition leader
*Karen Kwiatkowski , retired military adviser inThe Pentagon
*Azees Al-Hakim , member of current Iraqi government
*Michael C. Ruppert , author of "From the Wilderness ", studying thepeak oil issue (among others)
*Randa Habib , director of the Frenchpress agency inJordan
*Gen. Piérre-Marie Gallois, energy-strategyanalytist
*David Mulholland , editor of magazine focused on military technology
*Ahmed Rashid , author of "The Taliban" bookLocations
The filmmakers were shooting in several locations of
Afghanistan ,Pakistan andIraq (besides theUSA ), interviewing local people or local authorities mostly on the influences and ramifications of theOperation Enduring Freedom and president Bush's 'spreading ofdemocracy ' in the respective regions.Introductory presupposition
During the film, spectator is given some prepositions and
axiom s that become a basis for film authors' argumentation, such as:
*Oil is indispensable in every aspect of our modern-way lives.
*Worldfood production is 95% dependent onhydro-carbon energy .
*Demand for oil is and will be growing as new markets (e.g.India andChina ) gains in strength and local consumers start to demand higher life standard.
*3/4 are the world's oil discoveries located inMiddle East , as well as the ratio of the volume of oil needed to be imported to the United States.
*From2010 on, economies of some continents or world regions will run out of oil and that will make them utterly dependent on foreign oil supply. The film says: "The reality is, however, that major conflicts are likely to erupt before any of these players actually runs out of oil."Argumentation
On the basis of these presuppositions, the film tries to seek a step taken in the name of US foreign policy from this point of view. It relies to the motives of the United States of 2000 to build new military bases in the Middle East for the sake of increase of their strategical power. It comes to conclusion that the best candidate to this was
Iraq as the country with second biggest storages of oil and its military paralyzed by dozen years of bombing on a weekly basis. The possibility to potentially stop oil export from this country equals the political power in the region (according to David Mulholland).Oil Factor is also skeptical about consequences of all current war conflict both on local inhabitants and American soldiers.
Iraq
The documentary first analyzes the development of support of Iraqi citizens that showed exacerbation approximately year and half after the invasion. It also touches the issue of 320+
ton s of American munition made ofdepleted uranium since the firstGulf War and its consequences to local inhabitants, as well as the discrepancy ofPaul Bremer 's pledge to provide truly democratic elections with choosing representatives with pro-American who represent neither theShiites majority norIslam ists as such. According toShiites (present in neighboringIran , current economic US enemy) it mentions theIran-Contra affair of1979 and Shiite support of theHizballah as an aspect the United States "will not tolerate".Afghanistan
The part dedicated to the invasion to
Afghanistan (Operation Enduring Freedom ), introduced by the film as a "war virtually forgotten by media" begins with a rhetoric question of why the coalition units invaded the "extremely poor and desolated country" and why this military operation, allegedly waged for capturingOsama bin Laden and otherAl Qaeda members, involves such vast concentration of American military technologies and building big permanent military bases, supposing thissearch and destroy mission would last for decades.The documentary answers this question via
Ahmed Rashid - according to his reasoning the clandestine reason is upcoming struggle for dwindling energy sources like oil and natural gas, abundantly present in the area of Central-Asian states -Turkmenistan ,Uzbekistan ,Kyrgyzstan aKazakhstan . The players of this struggle areRussia ,China and theUnited States of America . While bothChina andRussia neighbors with at least some of the mentioned countries, USA do not and if they want to import Central-Asian oil or gas, they have to establish a pipeline to theIndian ocean . Such pipeline would have to run overPakistan andAfghanistan . While Pakistani authorities would not object the construction, AfghaniTalliban members and local warlords embody a peril of the intact existence of the pipeline.American presence in oil-rich regions
In the last part of Oil Factor, the filmmakers go in for coalition (and especially US) soldiers, negatively acknowledge media campaigns to aid to recruit another young American men to join
US Army and object that clandestine agents are best known and verified way to fightterrorism , instead of huge conventional waging of war.Karen Kwiatkowski concludes: "If you draw a map that connects the dots between all of the bases that we have done since theCold War ended, what You see is American militaryhegemony - covering 90 per cent of global energy resources."ee also
*
Trans-Afghanistan Pipeline Books
*Chossudovsky, M.: "War and Globalisation: The truth about September 11th", ISBN 80-903355-0-0
*Brzezinski, Z.: "The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geo strategic Imperatives", Basic Books,1998 , ISBN 0465027261, [http://www.amazon.com/dp/0465027261]External links
* [http://www.theoilfactor.com/ Official site]
* [http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0435710/ The Oil Factor: Behind the War on Terror] onIMDB
* [http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=1130731388742388243 Oil Factor] onGoogle Video
* [http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=04/10/22/143233 Short review] on Democracy Now!
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