Don't Knock Opportunity Knocks

The argument against Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11 implication that our Afghanistan strategy may have been compromised by a conflict of interest:
War, Lies, and Videotape: A Viewer’s Guide to Fahrenheit 9/11

In any case, these claims aren’t even true. The notion that the invasion of Afghanistan had anything to do with the Unocal pipeline idea is belied by the simple fact that efforts to create such a pipeline ended in 1998.. ..and have not been resumed.. ..In 2002, after the American overthrow of the Taliban, officials in the new Afghan government agreed with Turkmenistan and Pakistan to discuss a different pipeline.. ..but this agreement had nothing to do with Unocal, Halliburton, or any other American company—or with anything that was at all related to the earlier pipeline possibility that Moore is talking about. [Emphasis added]

News item from May 13th:
Afghan ‘pipe dream’ draws closer to reality

KABUL, AFGHANISTAN – Back in the days of the Taliban, Mir Sediq was an engineer for Unocal, working on a pipe dream: bringing natural gas from Turkmenistan down through Afghanistan to Pakistani ports on the Arabian Sea. [Emphasis added]

Today, Mr. Sediq is minister for Afghanistan’s energy, mining, and industrial sector, and he’s confident that the pipeline is coming close to reality.

I do not claim the Afghanistan War was waged solely in the interest of this pipeline. However, we know how politics works. We know what kind of influence corporations hold over politicians worldwide. We know how opportunistic these creatures are; and war provides opportunity. Moore may have sensationalized the pipeline connection in his argument, but the writing is on the wall.

Almost every political act is tainted by power-seekers under the influence of money in the service of opportunistic private institutions.
(Another aspect of the Great Machine – M.)