Cabal TV: the Washington "experts" who shape public opinion have private clients and hidden agendas.

• Author: Clark, Bruce
• Position: Shadow Elite: How the World's New Power Brokers Undermine Democracy, Government, and the Free Market - Book review

Shadow Elite: How the World's New Power Brokers Undermine Democracy, Government, and the Free Market

by Janine R. Wedel

Basic Books, 304 pp.

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At the Lausanne Conference, which began in November 1922 and lasted until the following summer, the world's leading powers created a new political order in the former Ottoman lands. At least in public, the participants spoke in idealistic terms: the talk was of protecting oppressed minorities and making real the new principle of self-determination for small nations. But behind the scenes, the Western powers had other preoccupations, especially oil. The United States, a new player in the region's diplomacy (and technically just an observer at Lausanne), was keen to present itself to Turkey as a benign political and commercial partner, untainted by Old World intrigues.

America's senior envoy to the region, Admiral Mark Bristol, had been cultivating Turkey's rulers and doing his best to suppress information (about atrocities, for example) that might show his friends in a bad light. His boss, Secretary of State Charles Evans Hughes, was sympathetic: in another life he had been an attorney for Standard Oil, which coveted the oilfields in the Ottoman lands that now constitute northern Iraq. In April 1923, America's commercial diplomacy scored a triumph: a giant oil-and-railway concession was awarded by Turkey to an American syndicate, favored by Bristol, to the dismay of Britain and France. The concession collapsed (partly because Britain was occupying the lands it involved), but the pro-Turkish tilt among America's political, commercial, and intellectual elites continued. In respected American journals like Current History, articles began to appear in praise of the young Turkish state. The American public's sympathy for the travails of the Christian subjects of the Ottoman Empire, which had been overwhelming a few years earlier, was counterbalanced by a new narrative.

Has anything really changed? Governments still present their policies in terms of lofty ideals, even when cash and contracts are heavily on their minds. Public servants continue to have private interests that they often try to conceal or play down. And the brokers of financial and political power still use all available channels of information to create a benign atmosphere for their activities. In a startling recurrence, the oil deposits that were at stake in Lausanne, those of Iraqi Kurdistan, have recently triggered a fresh conflict-of-interest controversy. Peter Galbraith, a former U.S. diplomat who advised the Kurds on how to keep control of their resources in a federal Iraq, has acknowledged (and vigorously defended) his business interests in the region, including a contract with a Norwegian firm that developed Kurdistan's first oilfield. "I was a private citizen...