From: All the News That Doesn't Fit <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subject: [NYTr] The Lies of Alan Greenspan
The Nation - Sep 17, 2007 http://www.thenation.com/blogs/notion?pid=233482 The Lies of Alan Greenspan by William Greider Alan Greenspan has come back from the tomb of history to correct the record. He did not make any mistakes in his eighteen-year tenure as Federal Reserve chairman. He did not endorse the regressive Bush tax cuts of 2001 that pumped up the federal deficits and aggravated inequalities. He did not cause the housing bubble that is now in collapse. He did not ignore the stock market bubble that subsequently melted away and cost investors $6 trillion. He did not say the Iraq War is "largely about oil." Check the record. These are all lies. Greenspan's testimony endorsing the Bush tax cuts was extremely influential but now he wants to run away from it. In the instance of Iraq, Greenspan is actually correcting his own memoir, The Age of Turbulence, which just came out. This weekend, newspapers reported provocative snippets from the book, including this: "I am saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what every everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil." Wow, talk about your "inconvenient truth." Greenspan was blithely acknowledging what official Washington has always denied and the news media faithfully ignored. "Blood for oil." No, no, no, that's not what he meant, Greenspan corrected in a follow-up interview. [Bob Woodward in Monday's Washington Post] He was only saying that "taking out Saddam was essential" for "oil security" and the global economy. Are you confused? Welcome to the world of slippery truth Greenspan has always lived in. He was the Maestro, as Bob Woodward's loving portrait dubbed him. Wall Street loved the Chairman best because the traders and bankers knew he was always on their side and would come to their rescue. The major news media treated him like an Old Testament prophet. Whatever the chairman said was carved on stone tablets, even when it didn't make any sense, as it often didn't. Some of us who followed his tracks more closely, were not so kind. Harry Reid, now the Democratic Senate leader, said Greenspan was "one of the biggest political hacks in Washington." Amen. I called him "the one-eyed chairman" who could always spot reasons to stomp on the real economy of work and production, but was utterly blind to the destructive chaos in the financial system. No matter. The adoration of him was nearly universal. Until now. The economic consequences of his rule are accumulating and even the dullest financial reporters are stumbling on crumbs of truth about Greenspan's legendary reign. It sowed profound and dangerous imbalances in the US economy. That's what happens when government power tips the balance in favor of capital over labor, favoring super-rich over middle class and poor, then holds it there for nearly a generation. Things get out of whack and now the country is paying big time. A pity reporters and politicians didn't have the nerve to ask these questions when Greenspan was in power. He retired only a year ago, but is already trying to revise the history. To explain away blunders that are now a financial crisis facing his successor. To rearrange the facts in exculpatory ways. To deny his right-wing ideological bias and his raw partisanship in behalf of the Bush Republicans. The man is shrewd. He can see the conservative era he celebrated and helped to impose upon the American economy is in utter ruin. He is trying to get some distance from it before the blood splashes all over his reputation. Of course, he also came back to cash in--an $8 million advance for a book that is sure to be a huge bestseller. I don't want to be unkind, but Greenspan could have avoided all the embarrassing questions if his book was posthumous. *** From: All the News That Doesn't Fit <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subject: [NYTr] Iraq: Petraeus Helps Destroy Bush's "Proxy War" Claim IPS - Sep 17, 2007 http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=39294 Petraeus Helps Destroy Bush's "Proxy War" Claim by Gareth Porter WASHINGTON, Sep 17 (IPS) - In his prepared statement to the U.S. House Foreign Affairs and Armed Services committees last week, Gen. David Petraeus claimed that Iran is using the Quds Force to turn Shiite militias into a "Hezbollah-like force" to "fight a proxy war against the Iraqi state and coalition forces in Iraq". But Petraeus then shattered that carefully constructed argument by volunteering in answering a question that the Quds Force, an elite unit of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, had essentially left Iraq. "The Quds force itself, we believe, by and large those individuals have been pulled out of the country as have the Lebanese Hezbollah trainers that were being used to augment that activity..." Petraeus's contradictory statements on the Quds force are emblematic of an administration propaganda line that has essentially fallen apart because it was so obviously out of line with reality. Nine months after the George W. Bush administration declared that it was going to go after Iranian agents in Iraq who were threatening U.S. troops, the U.S. military still has not produced any evidence that the Quds Force operatives in Iraq were engaged in assisting the militias fighting against U.S. troops. The U.S. military command in Iraq has failed to capture a single Quds Force member whom it could link to the Shiite militias. And the evidence that has emerged over the past nine months about Shiite militias and their relationship to Iran suggests that Quds force personnel in Iraq never had the mission of assisting Shiite militias, as claimed by the Bush administration. It appears that an increasing number of military intelligence officers in Iraq have concluded that the Quds force has been steering clear of working directly with Shiite militias attacking U.S. troops, in order to avoid giving the Bush administration a pretext for aggression against Iranian territory. In a military briefing presented in Baghdad on Feb. 11, an unnamed U.S. official stated flatly that weapons were being smuggled into the country by the Quds Force, but the briefers failed to present any specific evidence to back up the assertion. Since that briefing, the U.S. military command has captured the alleged deputy head and key logistical officer of the main Iraqi EFP, or armour-penetrating explosives, network and a Hezbollah operative who was a liaison with the network, as well as a number of what it called "suspected members" or "suspected leaders" of a "secret cell terrorist network known for facilitating the transport of and EFPs from Iran to Iraq". But the interrogations of these detainees have not led to the capture of a single Iranian official. Nor has the military been able to identify a link between any Iraqi militia member and any Iranian official. On Jul. 6, Maj. Gen. Rick Lynch, commander of U.S. operations south of Baghdad, told reporters his troops had not captured "anybody that we can tie to Iran". Even more devastating to the "proxy war" line, Lynch's spokesperson, Alayne Conway, acknowledged on Aug. 19 that they had not caught anyone supplying arms from Iran to the Iraqi Shiite militias. There has long been some evidence, however, of a link between Shiite networks for procuring EFPs and other arms and Lebanese Hezbollah. The leader of a Madhi Army group that was carrying out attacks against British forces, Ahmad Jawwad al-Fartusi, who was arrested in September 2005, had lived in Lebanon for several years and was known to have personal contact with Hezbollah, according to a Mar. 27 New York Times report. Along with evidence of a growing relationship between Hezbollah and Moqtada al-Sadr's army, which has now culminated in a Sadr office in Beirut, such past links between the two Shiite groups suggest that Hezbollah's assistance to the Shiites need not have been ordered by Tehran. U.S. and British officials have acknowledged in the past that the EFP technology being used in Iraq might have entered Iraq from Hezbollah in Lebanon rather than from Iran. The premise that the Quds Force agents in Iraq were involved in training Shiites to carry out operations against U.S. troops was shattered when Lynch told reporters Aug. 19 that the Iranians were "facilitating the training of Shiite extremists" militiamen in Iraq. That clearly implied that the training was being done by Hezbollah. The Washington Post and other news outlets quoted Lynch's statement but nevertheless reported that Lynch had charged that Iranians were doing the training. A spokesperson for Lynch confirmed to IPS that Lynch had not made any allegation about Iranians training Shiites in Iraq. Petraeus dealt the final blow to the notion of a Quds Force training role when he noted that the Hezbollah trainers had also been withdrawn from the country. The charge that Iran was using the Quds force to fight a proxy war was an effort to raise tension with Iran by suggesting a potential reason for U.S. attack against Iran. Similarly, the pressure for targeting the Quds Force in Iraq late last year came from senior officials in the Bush administration who wished to demonstrate U.S. resolve to confront Iran, according to an in-depth account of the origins of the plan by the Washington Post's Dafna Linzer published Feb. 26. That policy was regarded with "scepticism" by the intelligence community, the State Department and the Defence Department when it was proposed, Linzer wrote, because of the fear it would contribute to an escalation conflict with Iran. "This has little to do with Iraq," a senior intelligence officer told Linzer. "It's all about pushing Iran's buttons. It's purely political." [Gareth Porter is an historian and national security policy analyst. His latest book, "Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam", was published in June 2005.] --------------------------------------------------------------------------- LAAMN: Los Angeles Alternative Media Network --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Unsubscribe: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Subscribe: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Digest: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Help: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Post: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Archive1: <http://www.egroups.com/messages/laamn> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Archive2: <http://www.mail-archive.com/[EMAIL PROTECTED]> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Yahoo! Groups Links <*> To visit your group on the web, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/laamn/ <*> Your email settings: Individual Email | Traditional <*> To change settings online go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/laamn/join (Yahoo! ID required) <*> To change settings via email: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] <*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] <*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to: http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
