"Tracing some of [Michael] Moore's recent comments," Kay Hymowitz wrote last summer, "one can piece together the argument—or rather the hazy impressions, for Moore never constructs an argument—that will make up this so-called documentary. Moore will insinuate that the United States created Usama—'or USA-ma, which is more appropriate considering we trained him to be a terrorist.' He will tell us that in the late nineties the oil firm Unocal held a meeting with Taliban representatives in Houston, 'when Bush was governor,' to talk about building a pipeline through Afghanistan. He will imply that this project was the reason the U.S. gave humanitarian aid to the Taliban, until 'the deal went south,' and 'suddenly the Taliban were evil.' And thus, Michael Moore will finally reveal the awful truth that only he is courageous enough to admit about why the United States really went to war with the Taliban."
Hymowitz, a full year before Fahrenheit 9/11 hit American theaters, nailed the script to a tee. What's more, she called the international reaction to Fahrenheit 9/11 as well.
"And you can be sure that the trendy sophisticates in Cannes and Hollywood will once again rise to their feet to honor their mendacious auteur, European intellectuals will bow before his Manichaean simplicities, and the international radical Left will cheer the moral obtuseness of the man who has made his fortune turning the documentary into fiction," she wrote in The City Journal.
Among the punditry, Hymowitz's feat is a bit like Babe Ruth calling his shot. Or maybe the hackneyed Michael Moore is just that predictable.
Actually, they both cribbed the "argument" from Gore Vidal, who leveled just these charges in one of the English-language European left newspapers shortly (within a year) after September 11, 2001. I think it may have been in the Guardian.
I don't know if it's still available online, but it claims a sustained US foreign policy of "control of the mineral resources in Central Asia" based upon a 1997 policy paper by Zbigniew B. (however you spell his last name--from the Carter Admin.).
He (Gore Vidal) went into that Taliban-Unocal pipeline crap in detail. It's actually a somewhat interesting story in its own right, but certainly not the entire reason (or even half the reason) for our invasion of Afghanistan.
So your shot-caller isn't all that...
And of course Michael Moore is engaged in impressionistic insinuation, rather than argument.
That's why he's so effective on a certain segment of the population (cf. Alan Wolfe's piece in the July 11 New York Times Review of Books on Moore, Coulter, et al. as "The New Pamphleteers," comparing them to pamphlet writers in the earliest periods of American history -- this explains a lot, I think).
Respek,
Le G.
In "Intellectual Morons," I make the point about Vidal popularizing a lot of the Left conspiracy theories, specifically the Unocal one that figures so prominently in Fahranheit 9/11.
