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To kick off the series, a preview showing of "The Oil Factor: Behind the War on Terror" will be given on Friday, December 10 at 7:30 PM in Maryland Hall 110, Homewood Campus, Johns Hopkins University, 3400 N. Charles St., Baltimore. The event is free and open to the public.
The film, which will be released for theatrical distribution early next year, was made by documentary filmmakers Gerard Ungerman and Audrey Brohy ("Hidden Wars of Desert Storm" and "Plan Colombia"). Ungerman and Brohy spent three months filming in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan, interviewing a wide range of people including representatives of the US government and American contractors, military officers, and local political and religious figures. Others interviewed include former National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski, Noam Chomsky, Project for a New American Century Director Gary Schmitt, Pentagon analyst Karen Kwiatkowski, and Ahmed Rashid, author of Taliban.
The film develops an argument about the geo-strategic motivations for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, involving control over the oil resources of the Persian Gulf and Central Asia. The film will be followed by an open discussion, oriented by the question, "Are the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan about oil? Or....?" The discussion will begin with brief remarks by Dr. Peter Molan, a spokesperson for the Baltimore chapter of Veterans For Peace. Dr. Molan is a retired Middle East analyst for the US Department of Defense, a US Army veteran, and a scholar of Islamic law and Middle East politics.
The event has been organized by the Hopkins Anti-War Coalition. Email jgerrit3@jhu.edu for more information.
This story was published on December 3, 2004.