The Oil Factor

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Oil Factor
Directed by	Gerard Ungerman, Audray Brohy
Produced by	Free-Will Production
Release date	July 15, 2005 (2005-07-15)
Running time	93 minutes
Language	English

The Oil Factor, alternatively known as Behind the War on Terror, is a 2004 movie written and directed by Gerard Ungerman and

and oil-abundant regions.

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
• MIT
• Project for a New American Century
• Paul Bremer, temporary (Iraqi) coalition leader
• Karen Kwiatkowski, retired military adviser in The Pentagon
• Azees Al-Hakim, member of current Iraqi government
• Michael C. Ruppert, author of From the Wilderness, studying the peak oil issue (among others)
• press agency in Jordan
• Gen. Piérre-Marie Gallois, energy-strategy analyst
• David Mulholland, editor of magazine focused on military technology
• Ahmed Rashid, author of The Taliban book

Locations

The filmmakers were shooting in several locations of

' in the respective regions.

Introductory presupposition

During the film, the spectator is given some prepositions and axioms that become a basis for film authors' argumentation, such as:

• Oil is indispensable in every aspect of our modern-way lives.
• World
  hydro-carbon energy
  .
• Demand for oil is and will be growing as new markets (e.g. India and China) gains in strength and local consumers start to demand higher life standard.
• 75% of the world's oil discoveries are located in the Middle East, as well as the ratio of the volume of oil needed to be imported to the United States.
• From 2010 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 examine the steps taken in the name of US foreign policy from this point of view. It refers to the motives of the United States in 2000 to build new military bases in the Middle East in order to increase their strategic power. It comes to the conclusion that the best candidate to this was Iraq as the country with the world's second biggest oil reserves, as well as its military being weakened by a dozen years of bombing on a weekly basis. According to David Mulholland, political power in the region is determined by the control of oil exports from this country.

Oil Factor is also sceptical about consequences of all current wars both on local populations 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+

as an aspect the United States "will not tolerate".

Afghanistan

The part dedicated to the invasion to

mission would last for decades.

The documentary answers this question via

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

, 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 the Cold War ended, what You see is American military hegemony - covering 90 per cent of global energy resources."

See also

• Michael Klare
• Trans-Afghanistan Pipeline

Books

• ISBN 80-903355-0-0
• ISBN 0-465-02726-1, [1]

External links

• Official site
• The Oil Factor: Behind the War on Terror on IMDb
• Oil Factor on Google Video
• Short review on Democracy Now!
• The Oil Factor at AllMovie