Black gold black ops

ENAR

Why is it that in Hollywood movies, the Middle East is always best understood by characters that are jaded? Watching George Clooney in Stephen Gaghan’s film Syriana, that obligation is again respected. Clooney, who portrays a CIA agent and won an Oscar for his role, shuffles through the scenes comatose with cynicism, burdened by his past manipulations, buffeted, too, by the perfidy of the American government. It’s fun, but Syriana, like its misleading title (Syria plays no role in the story), is a misleading film. It’s often an inaccurate, anachronistic compilation of tendentious postulations about oil politics in the Middle East, thrown out as complex truth to an unsuspecting audience. In a nutshell, the main plot involves an American oil company trying to regain oil drilling rights in an unidentified Arab emirate that has just awarded those rights to a higher-bidding Chinese company. The person behind the China deal is