Last Monday night Hardball, an MSNBC news show hosted by Chris Matthews,
discussed the significance of Alan Greenspan’s comment in his recently
published memoir:
I am saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge
what everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil.
This seemingly frank admission that the invasion of Iraq had more to do
with profits than defeating terrorism led inside the beltway pundits to
link Greenspan with protesters who chant “No blood for oil.” Greenspan
himself has been forced to backpedal, although his explanation is not
reassuring to those who want to frame the invasion of Iraq in human
rights terms. In a September 15th interview with Bob Woodward of the
Washington Post, Greenspan tried to get George W. Bush off the hook. He
explained, “”I was not saying that that’s the administration’s motive.
I’m just saying that if somebody asked me, ‘Are we fortunate in taking
out Saddam?’ I would say it was essential.”
Apparently, according to Woodward, there was a tacit understanding by
all parties that the war was about oil, but reluctance to speak openly
about it:
He said that in his discussions with President Bush and Vice
President Cheney, “I have never heard them basically say, ‘We’ve got to
protect the oil supplies of the world,’ but that would have been my
motive.” Greenspan said that he made his economic argument to White
House officials and that one lower-level official, whom he declined to
identify, told him, “Well, unfortunately, we can’t talk about oil.”
Chris Matthews introduced his report on Greenspan’s comments as follows:
Ever since that first war to throw Saddam out of Kuwait, the people
who hated the war said it was all about oil. We Americans have an
unquenchable thirst for oil. The promoters of both Iraq wars like to say
we’re bigger than that, that we fought the war for idealistic reasons,
the spread of democracy, our opposition to tyranny, our love of peace
and goodness.
Well, this weekend, word leaked from the recent chairman of
America’s central bank, Alan Greenspan, that the war was indeed about
oil. Indeed, it was largely about oil, he writes. In that quote, by the
way, he also says, and everybody knows it.
Matthews proceeded to discuss the oil and war connection with two
guests, Jim Cramer, the frenetic investment guru, and Ed Schultz, a
liberal talk radio personality. He directed his first question to Schultz:
You know, Ed, the old—not to disparage it, but the old left, you
would do Marxist analysis of just about everything in history—Sam Beer,
I think, believed this, the historian—that just about everything can be
interpreted as economics—self-interest, if you will. Do you believe that
this war, well, all wars are about economics. What do you think?
My guess is that the mysterious “Sam Beer” must be Charles Beard, who
was not really a Marxist at all. His approach can best be described as
economic determinism. Indeed, his seminal work is titled “An Economic
Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States.” While there is
a superficial resemblance between economic determinism and Marxism, the
latter discipline puts much more emphasis on the tendency of class
society to incorporate contradictory tendencies. For example, in the
18th Brumaire Marx pointed out that the rights of the capitalist ruling
class in France had to be abrogated in the long-term interests of the
capitalist system. There are times when Marxism collapses into something
not much different from economic determinism, namely “Vulgar Marxism,”
which reminds me of Bob Fitch’s observation that vulgar Marxism can
explain about 90 per cent of the social world, but that social science
is only interested in the remaining 10 per cent.
full:
http://louisproyect.wordpress.com/2007/09/19/greenspan-oil-and-marxism/
