A Contemporary Corallary to Syriana

The new Traffic-esque film, Syriana (produced by that movie's director Steven Soderberg and directed by its writer Stephen Gaghan) opens this weekend, and it's been getting middling to good praise (seems most of the reviewers aren't pleased by its muy complicado plotting and didacticism). Here's a brief section of the review by Stuart Klawans from The Nation (via AlterNet):

I wanted Three Kings, The Bourne Identity, Angels in America, no matter how much the American people might need Stephen Gaghan's Syriana.

Does an informed citizenry require this picture? Maybe. Television and radio do a poor job of analyzing the relationships among oil companies, lawyers, financiers, governments (at overt and covert levels) and the world's Muslim population (whether militant or just hanging on). In fact, television and radio generally welcome such analysis as they would a tax audit from a hepatitis carrier. They prefer such unpleasantness to be handled by The Nation, a publication that goes unread by 99.93 percent of Americans. So all honor to Gaghan, his producers and Warner Bros. for taking on the job. If Gaghan (best known for the screenplay of Steven Soderbergh's Traffic) has overreached, then he's failed the right way, through an excess of virtue. Syriana's flaws, presumably, would come from his faults as a first-time director.

And here's a bit about the plot from the Minneapolis Star-Tribune review:

As the starting point for the story, Gaghan used "See No Evil," the memoirs of ex-CIA agen Robert Baer. He's represented in the movie by Bob Barnes (Clooney), an aging CIA operative in the Middle East whose assignment is to stir up trouble for anyone his boxxxes dn't want gaining too much control.

Those bosses get a call from Connex, a conglomerate that lost a bidding war for oil rights in a fictional country. The contract went instead to a Chinese company.

The country is run by an elderly emir who is expected to tunr control over to one of his two sons. The yojnger is intent on following his father's footsteps and maintaining close ties with US interests, but his reform-minded older brother realizes that there is a greater potential profit in selling oil on the open market. Barnes' mission is to get the younger brother the promotion--and to do whatever he feels is necessary in the process

While this news piece from The Guardian doesn't have the skullduggery of Syriana's plot, it does show that energy corporations are willing to do anything to keep the profits flowing:

Lobbyists funded by the US oil industry have launched a campaign in Europe aimed at derailing efforts to tackle greenhouse gas pollution and climate change.

Documents obtained by Greenpeace and seen by the Guardian reveal a systematic plan to persuade European business, politicians and the media that the EU should abandon its commitments under the Kyoto protocol, the international agreement that aims to reduce emissions that lead to global warming. The disclosure comes as United Nations climate change talks in Montreal on the future of Kyoto, the first phase of which expires in 2012, enter a critical phase.

The documents, an email and a PowerPoint presentation, describe efforts to establish a European coalition to "challenge the course of the EU's post-2012 agenda". They were written by Chris Horner, a Washington DC lawyer and senior fellow at the rightwing thinktank, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, which has received more than $1.3m (£750,000) funding from the US oil giant Exxon Mobil. Mr Horner also acts for the Cooler Heads Coalition, a group set up "to dispel the myth of global warming".

The PowerPoint document sets out plans to establish a group called the European Sound Climate Policy Coalition. It says: "In the US an informal coalition has helped successfully to avert adoption of a Kyoto-style program. This model should be emulated, as appropriate, to guide similar efforts in Europe."
[...]
The PowerPoint document written by Mr Horner appears to be aimed at getting RWE, the German utility company, to join a European coalition of companies to act against Kyoto.

The document says: "The current political realities in Brussels open a window of opportunity to challenge the course of the EU's post-2012 agenda." It adds: "Brussels must openly acknowledge and address them willingly or through third party pressure."
[...]
In the email, dated January 28 this year, Mr Horner describes Europe as an "opportunity". He says it "would be like Neil Armstrong, it's a developing untapped frontier". He adds: "US companies need someone they can trust, and it's just a den of thieves over there."