----- Original Message ----- From: "Yoshie Furuhashi" <furuhashi.1 at osu.edu>
Deborah says:
> > UNOCAL was about a natural gas deal.
>
>Exactamundo. Big time. And it was a playground for both nefarious
>business developers and long-range pragmatists.
Is it necessarily nefarious for companies to want to build pipelines, oil or natural gas, in foreign nations? Unless F 9/11 can support a stronger claim -- e.g., UNOCAL made the Bush team invade Afghanistan so it can build a pipeline that it couldn't have built otherwise -- with evidence, which the film can't, I'm not sure if the UNOCAL business idea is all that important, except it may be important fodder for conspiracy theorists.
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F 9/11 *never* made a functionalist claim. It is *you* imputing/projecting your own methodological determinsim/capitalism as deux ex machina framing onto the film.
You really don't understand international business deals, project management, the day to day issues of capital formation and the like do you? Not to mention uncertainty, risk and the like.......
Whether or not the pipeline idea will prove to be pragmatic in the short or long term depends on whether or not foreign troops can provide security in Afghanistan, which they, being too few, have so far been incapable of doing.
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Let's get technical; which unit[s] of the US army is providing security on the western border of Afghanistan? No Googling!
In the long run we're still in the short run, as Basil Moore puts it.
DRR says:
<snip>
> > terrorist attacks, and the wars on Afghanistan and Iraq: "Okay, so
>> let's say one group of people, like the American people, pay you
>> $400,000 a year to be President of the United States. But then
>> another group of people invest in you, your friends, and their
>> related businesses $1.4 billion dollars over a number of years. Who
> > you gonna like? Who's your daddy?" That's conspiracy theory.
>
>Ah, I see. So when Michael Moore points out that money influences
>political decisions, that's conspiracy theory.
The quote comes from Moore's voice-over narration about Saudi money in particular, not money in general. Exactly what US political decisions has Saudi money influenced? Why can't Saudi money buy a better deal for Palestinians in line with Saudi Arabia's own proposal rather than Israel's?
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There you go with demands for perfect determinism again. Let's see your positive argument [which is notoriously *absent* and typical armchair quarterbacking drivel] explain why Bush I called off $10 billion in aid to Israel if your model of causality re mid-east politics is airtight............
Carl says:
>I have just one complaint about F 9/11, but it's a big one -- the
>movie's complete neocon void. I don't think that scene of Wolfowitz
>slobbering over his comb provides much info about one of the main
>driving forces of the Iraq war.
If the film wants to make something of the neocon project for the Middle East, it needs to say something about the place of Israel in it, which Mooore -- who is pretty pro-Palestinian in his personal opinion -- chose not to do for this film.
Another absence in the film is John Kerry.
I gather that the two absences are related to each other.
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Do you really expect the US citizenry to sit through a six-eight hour film laying out the past 15-20 years of US policy in the mideast etc.
Let's pummel Moore for not bringing up the Bushies sex life and quantum mechanics and it's role in contemporary energy market futures and foreign policy debates. The silence must be a conspiracy!!
Ian