Posted on 09/15/2007 4:21:02 PM PDT by freespirited
AMERICA’s elder statesman of finance, Alan Greenspan, has shaken the White House by declaring that the prime motive for the war in Iraq was oil.
In his long-awaited memoir, to be published tomorrow, Greenspan, a Republican whose 18-year tenure as head of the US Federal Reserve was widely admired, will also deliver a stinging critique of President George W Bush’s economic policies.
However, it is his view on the motive for the 2003 Iraq invasion that is likely to provoke the most controversy. “I am saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil,” he says.
Greenspan, 81, is understood to believe that Saddam Hussein posed a threat to the security of oil supplies in the Middle East.
Britain and America have always insisted the war had nothing to do with oil. Bush said the aim was to disarm Iraq of weapons of mass destruction and end Saddam’s support for terrorism
Did Greenscam decide to take off his mask or did he just go ga-ga?
I guess it could be both, they're not mutually exclusive.
He knows it, Bush knows it, we know it. Thats not the issue. He seems to be unhappy that it was deemed inexpedient to explicitly lay out the strategic background.
I am too, as this has been a source of much confusion and opportunities for disingenuous rhetoric on the part of our opponents.
One of the problems with Iran getting nukes is that they will be able to blackmail THE ME oil producing nations
And wasn’t oil the reason for the multinational force going in to get Saddam out of Kuwait
1. Most was right by the Kuwaiti border, the Rumaila oilfield and the main oil terminal. One couldn’t help but run into them, these were the first bits of Iraq. The Kirkuk-Mosul fields were not taken until the very end - because they were on the other side of the country from the invasion forces.
2. It was threatened with demolition a la Kuwait in 1991, only on a greater scale. That would have been very bad for any number of reasons. Other Iraqi infrastructure was not threatened by demolition.
3. It represents almost the sole economic support for the Iraqi economy.
Then where the heck is it?
Greenspans point is related, as I read it, but even better. The point is that a nut in that area has an opportunity to blackmail the world economy.
ping!
Protecting the free worlds oil supply was just one of the economic reasons.
Verifying that Saddam had destroyed his WMD as required by the UN was just one of the humanitarian reasons.
The US oil supply will never be in danger - oil is a fungible commodity and any shortage can be made up just by paying more. The real threat is not national but global.
That threat cannot be significantly alleviated by increasing US oil supplies, these will be just a drop in the bucket in global terms. We cannot sit fat and happy while Europe, Japan, China, India, etc. crash. The last time this happened we got fascist governments around the world and a world war.
What is even weirder is that Israel is probably their best source of intelligence about plots against them from within the Arab countries. They can probably trust Israel to be straighter with them than than their neighbors.
Don’t think it is not possible. Turkey, Jordan, and Egypt all have “working relationships” with Israel. Quiet, but working nonetheless. Besides, who right now is the only power in the ME with working nuclear warheads and delivery systems?
Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and Egypt trust Israel with nukes more than they trust Iran or Syria with nukes. Israel is smart enough to know what happens to them all if nukes are used in that relatively small area.
Iran scares them more than Israel does.
“spreading democracy” - strategy to pre-empt dangerous totalitarian dictators.
“wmd” - can’t be produced in those parts without either said totalitarian dictators and a lot of oil money.
“Whenever somebody tells me that it’s all about oil, I answer “It goddam better be.””
I only wish it was about the oil we took from Arab despots, and not about oil for an Iraqi soon-to-be-islamic-fundamentalist state.
Oil? Who'da thunk it! This guy, he's like a genius. Plays a mean saxophone, too.
An unambitious and defanged Islamic fundamentalist state, in that condition because of division and dissention is a much less dangerous thing, even with oil.
Please, why would the White House be shaken, who cares what Greenspan thinks about the war?
Sorry, you really do not understand the mindset of the dems. They think they would get more power out of troubles in the U.S. than out of problems outside the U.S.
When the citizens are crying for heat in the winter and gas for the cars to get around. The dems win in so many ways.
They get the power to control every thing and do it while implementing their version of liberal heaven on earth.
“An unambitious and defanged Islamic fundamentalist state, in that condition because of division and dissention is a much less dangerous thing, even with oil.”
Unfortunately we’ve been building first-world infrastructure for the new Islamic Iraq......I’d rather have a regionally siginficant Iraq run by a secular tyrant that did our bidding - with Iran and Saudi Arabia,(maybe even Kuwait....ironically) than one that is powerless and splintered and dependent.
He’s scared of his wife? LOL
you make a good point.
Thank you! So many people seem to think the "about oil" argument only works one particular way. It's about oil because oil is valuable and strategic, and Saddam was a bad person who did bad stuff with the power the control of the oil gave him. This all would have been true even if Iraq's valuable commodity were something we neither used nor desired whatsoever.
The "about oil" people, however, have such little imagination that the only thing they can envision, if they convince themselves something is "about oil", is that we somehow want to take a bunch of oil. (And the fact that this isn't what we're doing, doesn't dissuade them in the slightest from this view.) This is really stupid and small-minded. It's like assuming that because the government's pursuit of Al Capone was about alcohol (which it was, after all), this means the government was primarily motivated by a desire to take Al Capone's alcohol. Similarly, no one would dispute that when a big coke dealer is arrested, the reason for his incarceration is coke. By the "about oil" type argument, this necessarily means that the government wanted to take all the guy's cocaine to use for themselves.
When an action taken by party X against party Y is "about" some underlying valuable commodity, even if that's an accurate characterization, it takes a very small mind to conclude that the whole event can be summarized by painting a simplistic cartoon picture in which X simply wants to take the commodity from Y.
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