What is grotesque about this moment of
plot clarity is that the overwhelmingly obvious critique of actual U.S.
policy in the real Middle East today concerns America's excess of Wilsonian
idealism in trying to find and promote -- against a tide of tyranny,
intolerance and fanaticism -- local leaders like the Good Prince. Who in the
greater Middle East is closest to the modernizing, democratizing paragon of
"Syriana"? Without a doubt, President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan, a man of
exemplary -- and quite nonfictional -- personal integrity, physical courage
and democratic temperament. Hundreds of brave American (and allied NATO) soldiers have died protecting him and the democratic system they established
to allow him to govern. On the very night the Oscars will be honoring
"Syriana," American soldiers will be fighting, some perhaps dying, in
defense of precisely the kind of tolerant, modernizing Muslim
leader that "Syriana" shows America slaughtering.

Most liberalism is angst- and guilt-ridden, seeing moral equivalence
everywhere. "Syriana" is of a different species entirely -- a pathological
variety that burns with the certainty of its malign anti-Americanism. Osama bin
Laden could not have scripted this film with more conviction.