Sidney Pollack, Scott McClellan, and the Wars for Oil

OK, let’s connect the dots: The Iraq War & Occupation. Scott McClellan’s memoir. The death of film director Sydney Pollack.

When I heard about the death of Pollack last week, I happened coincidentally to be rewatching one of his earliest films, from 1971, “Three Days of the Condor.” In it, Robert Redford plays a bookish CIA analyst who survives the mass-murder of his entire unit because he was “out to lunch,” literally and figuratively. The rest of the movie involves Redford (codename “Condor”) staying one step ahead of the assassins sent to get him while he tries desperately to figure out what the hell is going on.

All Condor knows is that somehow there’s a CIA plot involving areas around the globe where three distinct languages are spoken: Spanish, Dutch and Arabic. By the end of the film, and remember that it was made in 1971, he finally has it figured out: The three regions where those languages are spoken — the Middle East, Latin America, and former Dutch colonies in the Pacific and East Africa — possess huge untapped oil reserves, and the U.S. wants to ensure that it will have effective control of those energy resources far into the future. To do so, it will stop at nothing, including violent or non-violent regime changes abroad and hiding its motives from the American citizenry at home, even if doing so requires assassinating its own researchers and agents.

Smirking Chimp