Greenspan: “the Iraq war is largely about oil”
Written by Sam on September 16th, 2007AMERICA’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.
So how will the Bush Administration spin this one? I don’t know that I really agree with the whole war for oil mantra, but I never believed that the primary reason we were going into Iraq was to stop Saddam before he posed an eminent threat. Personally, I think Bush had every intention of invading Iraq before he even won the 2000 election so he could finish off what his father didn’t. 9-11 made it all the more easier.
It’s going to be interesting now to see how Greenspan gets treated by fellow Republicans. He’s been a well respected member of the party for decades. Will he have his character assassinated? Will he now be mocked and ridiculed? This is quite damaging to be coming from his mouth. That doesn’t mean it’s true and should not be taken as gospel, but damaging nonetheless. Ron Paul is one of the only real conservatives in Congress and he has been treated like a bastard at a family reunion by many conservatives ever since he publicly differed with the GOP on the war.
Bush took an opportunity that Republicans hadn’t had in decades, the White House and control of both chambers of Congress, and flushed it down the crapper with out of control spending, with the biggest expansion in the Federal Government ever, and by taking us into an unnecessary war that has cost America thousands of lives and billions and billions of dollars. He could have taken this rare opportunity to cut government and advance Federalism, but instead he chose to slowly bankrupt us with increasing debt and restrict more of our freedoms, not expand them.
Regardless, we are in Iraq like it or not, and we must also be victorious for the sake of the people living there, but ultimately, at what price?
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I agree with a lot of what you said, especially with regard to Bush advancing liberal rather than conservative government policy.
That said, you knew you weren’t going to post this without opening up a can of worms on Iraq. I’ve gotten hell from just about everybody because I don’t fit neatly into any camp on the Iraq war. I agree with Paul that the war was, under American law, illegal. The Constitution does not give Congress the power to authorize the use of force. It does give Congress the power to declare war, which I think it should have done.
With regard to intentions, I agree that Bush had every intention of invading Iraq before he went into office, but I also think that his justifications for the war cost him dearly. Had he gone to Congress and the UN and said that we need to go to war with Iraq because they failed to live up to the peace agreement that ended the first conflict, I think he could’ve garnered wider and deeper support. With regard to WMD, a “We don’t know because he won’t allow the inspections he agreed to, and we have to make sure they’re not there” would have worked much better than evidence that has since been disputed. He watered down the message further when he started talking about spreading democracy and freeing the people of Iraq. If that happend as a result of war with Hussein, great, but it should never have entered the discourse during the discussions of whether war was the right course of action.
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Clearly Greenspan is off his rocker and is projecting his own would-be-motivations for taking down Saddam Hussein onto George W. Bush. The only thing that’s been flushed down the toilet lately is any pretense that “Save the GOP” really stands for improving the Republican Party.
EVERYONE believed Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction prior to the war, Republican and Democrat included.
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I guess we should have allowed Saddam Hussein to actually develop WMDs and to continue to support terrorism.
For every reason there was to go into Afghanistan on Septmber 10, 2001, there was a reason to go into Iraq, in addition to the fact that Saddam had the desire and capability to eventually develop nuclear weapons.
It might be attractive to jump on the bandwagon now, but to me it just seems to soon to resort to such foolishness and forget about what happens when you do nothing to stop evil (ex. the day after September 10, 2001).
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This McCarthy person is even more irritating than I am. While I frequently disagree with the views espoused on this website, I generally like reading it because it reflects a coherent philosophy rather than an idiotic Republican/Democrat horserace.
Sam points out that the indisputable fact that Greenspan has always been highly regarded by people on both sides of the aisle. However, since McCarthy is just a Republican hack, Greenspan is suddenly “off his rocker” as soon as he says something that doesn’t toe the Republican party line. Go over to Ann Coulter’s webpage where you belong.
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First off Greenspan has a viable point. It is in our economic interest to be a player in the middle east. Our economy runs on oil. If that is in jeopardy we are justified to fight for it. There I said. President Bush can’t but I can.
As for our reasons for going into Iraq it is obvious that some of my conservative brethren have fallen for the lefts continuous drumbeat on WMD’s. Because the UN resolutions were all about WMDs. How soon you forget President Bush and Colin Powell in 2002 addressing the UN on each of the 17 UN resolutions Iraq violated, specifically UNSCRs 687, 707, 949, 1051, 1060, 1115, 1134, 1137, 1154, 1194, and 1284.
Each detailed Iraq’s failure to comply with weapons inspections. 11 times Iraq failed to comply that they disarmed and here’s the part most forget, they had to prove that they did disarm. They didn’t. Forget that every major intelligence agency thought he had WMD’s, or the fact Saddam thought he had them. He ordered chemical weapons to be used shortly before Baghdad fell. His troops failed to follow his order because they didn’t have any. I am not even going to get into The Russsians and their suspicious convoys into Syria days before the attack.
This reminds me of a bit from an old Robin Williams routine where he describes how unarmed British bobbies deal with robbers: “Stop! Or I’ll say ’stop’ again!”. How many times do you tell them to stop before you go in and kick some ass?
The bottom line is we have a concerted effort by the media and the left to derail the President at any cost even to the detriment of the county.
I am not a Bush apologist, far from it. But facts are facts.
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I agree that evil should be confronted and unfortunately North Korea and Iran are getting stronger and more dangerous by the day because they aren’t being confronted and that is because we are spending all of our time and resources in Iraq. Could Saddam have eventually become a threat? Sure, and we may very well have had to deal with it at some point, but the ones that actually are making threats of wiping nations off of the planet and actually testing missiles have become more of a threat than he was and they’re getting away with it because they know that we aren’t a threat to them now.
And Eliezer, I’m not jumping on any bandwagon. I was opposed to the Iraq invasion since day one.
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Hind sight is always 20/20.
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Without getting into it too much, there was plenty of dissent on the Right when the war started. David Frum’s clumsy hit piece “Unpatriotic Conservatives” was a defense of Bush’s policy and an attack on these dissenters. National Review wouldn’t have felt the need for a front page attack if there wasn’t unrest among conservatives about Bush’s Wilsonian adventure.
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Yes, there was dissent about the need to fight an aggresive war on terrorism on the lunatic right and left, and on the part of partisan democrates.
The problem is that the national media loves to give attention to this fringe element on the right to make all conservatives look bad (this explains why probably the least likable figures in the media like Buchanan and Novak are often represent the conservative side).
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A good article by Jonah Goldberg on what Greenspan said is here. —
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-oe-goldberg18sep18,0,6583630.column?coll=la-opinion-columnists
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As far as the war goes, I can’t put it better than the invaluable Lawrence Auster —
“U.S. Senator Jim DeMint guest-posted yesterday at Powerline, summarizing and endorsing Gen. Petraeus’s view of Iraq. I’m especially struck by this:
‘He told us that al Qaeda senior leadership considers Iraq the central front in its radical Islamic terror war against the United States. Failure, said Petraeus, “would be an enormous shot of adrenaline in the arm of international jihadists.’”
So the main consequence of a U.S. withdrawal is not any concrete harm to ourselves, but the encouragement of our enemies. Having stupidly planted ourselves in Iraq for the chimerical purpose of building a democracy there, we must stay there in order to avoid a symbolic defeat and damage to our image.
Of course the al Qaeda victory would not just be symbolic. A constantly reiterated warning from the administration is that in the wake of a U.S. withdrawal al Qaeda would take over Iraq.
But, as Randall Parker writes at ParaPundit, this is a false alarm:
‘The foreign fighters who proclaim they are Al Qaeda forces (like replica watches using brand names), being Arab Sunnis, want the Arab Sunnis to regain power and see the Arab Shias as enemies. The Arab Shias are the clear majority of Iraqis and the Arab Sunnis are up against the Arab Shias and the Kurds. The Al Qaeda Sunni threat to continued Shia and Kurdish control is small. The Sunnis are getting steadily purged out of Baghdad, cementing Shia control of the “national” (using the term loosely here) government.’
If not al Qaeda and the Sunnis, what then is the threat? Certainly if the U.S. withdrew there would be a resurgence in the sectarian violence that the surge has tamped down, particularly violence against the Sunni minority by the Shi’ite-dominated government, which, in the absence of the U.S., would feel free to manifest its partisan Shi’ite nature. Also, it’s likely that Shi’ite Iran would gain increased influence, perhaps effective hegemony, over Shi’ite majority Iraq. All of which is very different from saying that al Qaeda would take over Iraq.
On the other hand, assuming that at some point we did succeed in reducing violence in Iraq enough to hand the job of maintaining order over to the Iraqis and withdraw our forces, what would happen then? Iraq’s Shi’ite-dominated government would, of its own accord, move to much closer relations with Shi’ite Iran. Thus the “success” of the Bush policy, the “victory” in Iraq for which all patriotic Americans long, would produce a Shi’ite dominated Iraq in which Iran would be, at the least, very influential. Which is the same thing that we fear from a “failure” and a “defeat” in Iraq.
What am I missing here?”
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Hindsight is 20/20. And in hindsight, the Iraq war is one of the worst blunders that the United States has ever engaged in. Untangling the motivations and beliefs of everone who was behind this war (including the leading Democratic Presidential contender) is something historians will discuss for years. It was clearly mixed. Some reasons for the invasion were good (removing an unstable Saddam from power.) Some were good in theory but turned out to be wrong (there were no WMD’s). And some, were frankly idiotic at the time and look no better now. The idea that we were going to “democratize” the middle east using the military ranks somewhere between the invasion of Canada in 1812 and the Mossadeq coup in Iran when it comes to really dumb foreign policy ideas in US History. Hopefully when President Bush retires to Crawford, we’ll never have to listen to that claptrap again.
The other problem is that it is very hard to figured out how much the invasion itself was a bad idea, and how much of our current problem stems from the poor management of the war. If the war had been properly managed for the past 4 years, would we be in the position we are right now? Right now we are praying that General Petraus can pull off a miracle with the extra troops that we should have sent over 3 years ago (along with plenty others) We could have had a much larger force early on because guys wouldn’t have been exhausted from having already done 3 or 4 tours. That can’t possibly be a good thing.