Syriana, the new political thriller starring George Clooney, tries, but does not quite succeed, in explaining the phenomenon behind the new scourge of the twenty-first century - the rise of Islamist terrorism - and its weapon of choice, the suicide bomber.
While the film skirts the topic of how young Muslim men are easy prey to the "recruiter" who finds no difficulty turning the innocent youth into lethal suicide bombers, it falls short of offering a concise picture of why that is so.
The film misses the opportunity to examine the new face of international terrorism, which has undergone radical transformations over the last decade or two.
The use of terror by radical groups as a political tool has indeed seen tremendous change. In recent years terrorism went from being used in geographically limited conflicts to becoming a truly global phenomenon.
In the late 1960s and 1970s, groups such as Italy's Red Brigades, Germany's Baader-Meinhof Gang or the Irish Republican Army, for example, engaged in specific and limited geographic conflicts as they struggled to impose change upon their respective societies.
In contrast, today's terrorism has become global, striking anywhere from New York to London, Madrid, Istanbul, Bali or Karachi, not forgetting Baghdad, Amman and New Delhi. As international borders have become somewhat less relevant in today's global economy with migrant workers jumping continents in search of employment and mega-corporations selling Cokes, Nikes, McDonalds and the latest version of Microsoft Windows from Algeria to Zambia, so, too, has the war being waged by militant Islamists become global.
Syriana accentuates the plight of the over-exploited, underpaid, South Asian laborer, the tens of thousands of Indian, Pakistani and Baluchi migrant workers, some of who toil under near-slavery conditions on the oilrigs and affiliated jobs that the oil industry has created in the Arabian desert.
True, the depressed socioeconomic situation of these migrant workers facilitates their recruitment by politicized Islamists making them potential terrorist material. Yet the jobs they find in the oil-rich countries is often a step up, allowing them to escape the chronic unemployment and poverty back in their home countries.
While the large pool of imported work force in some oil-producing states outnumbers the local population 2-1, it is worth remembering that the majority of the 19 terrorists who on September 11, 2001, hijacked airliners and flew them into New York's World Trade Center and the Pentagon were not underpaid day laborers, but mostly young and educated university graduates.
Syriana is one of those Hollywood releases where Tinseltown meshes reality with Lala Land make-believe, intermingled with Washington's political wishful thinking. Often, what cannot be accomplished in real life due to geopolitical restraints and realities is given more than poetic license in Hollywood.
The outcome is very "today", in which you have a hard time distinguishing the blurred lines separating the good guys from the bad guys. How far will the CIA go to protect US interests?
The bad guys (in the movie) use torture to extract the information that they seek. But in real life we just discovered that the good guys are also using torture. And when they do not turn to torture themselves, they outsource it.
We learned that suspected terrorists were dispatched by US authorities to Syria, Egypt and Jordan, so that they could be "properly" interrogated.
The film, directed by Stephen Gaghan (scriptwriter of Traffic), with Clooney as a CIA agent, takes you behind the scenes in a Tehran not likely to be experienced by most business travelers to the Islamic republic.
It is the hidden side of the land of the ayatollahs where booze flows freely, where drugs and women are as readily available as in Las Vegas or Rio - the very thing that the Islamists are fighting against.
The film also takes us to a netherworld where backstabbing, double-crossing and corporate greed is also truly global - extending from the imaginary Syriana (or is it?), to the very real Washington and beyond.
It is unclear though if Syriana intends to tell us that the cause of Islamist terrorism, or at least part of it, comes as a result of Western corporate greed. Again, here the lines are somewhat unclear.
What is clear, though, is the ugly side of extreme white-collar corporate gluttony, where political assassinations are sanctioned on condition that they will guarantee that oil continues to flow to the good guys, and at a decent price. Fact or fiction? Again, blurred lines.
Politics & Policies: Syriana blurs lines
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