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Greenspan Spills the Beans on Oil
By Ray McGovern
September 16, 2007
For those still wondering why President George W. Bush and Vice
President Dick Cheney sent our young men and women into Iraq, the
secret is now “largely” out.
No, not from the lips of former Secretary of State Colin Powell. It
appears we shall have to wait until the disgraced general/diplomat
draws nearer to meeting his maker before he gets concerned over
anything more than the “blot” that Iraq has put on his reputation.
Rather, the uncommon candor comes from a highly respected Republican
doyen, economist Alan Greenspan, chairman of the Federal Reserve from
1987 to 2006, whom the president has praised for his “wise policies
and prudent judgment.”
Sadly for Bush and Cheney, Greenspan decided to put prudence aside in
his new book, The Age of Turbulence, and answer the most neuralgic
issue of our times—why the United States invaded Iraq.
Greenspan writes:
“I am saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge
what everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil.”
Everyone knows? Would that it were so. But it’s hardly everyone.
There are so many, still, who “can’t handle the truth,” and that is
understandable. I have found it a wrenching experience to conclude
that the America I love would deliberately launch what the Nuremburg
Tribunal called the “supreme international crime”—a war of aggression—
largely for oil.
For those who are able to overcome the very common, instinctive
denial, for those who can handle the truth, it really helps to turn
off the Sunday football games early enough to catch up on what’s
going on.
There they could have seen another of Bush’s senior economic
advisers, former Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill on Jan. 11, 2004,
discussing The Price of Loyalty, his memoir about his two years
inside the Bush administration.
O’Neill, a plain speaker, likened the president’s behavior at cabinet
meetings to that of “a blind man in a roomful of deaf people.” Cheney
and “a praetorian guard that encircled the president” would help Bush
make decisions off-line, blocking contrary views.
Cheney has a Rumsfeldian knack for aphorisms that don’t parse in the
real world— like “deficits don’t matter.” To his credit, O’Neill
picked a fight with that and ended up being fired personally by
Cheney. In his book, Greenspan heaps scorn on the same Cheneyesque
insight.
O’Neill made no bones about his befuddlement over the president’s
diffident disengagement from discussions on policy, except, that is,
for Bush’s remarks betraying a pep-rally-cheerleader fixation with
removing Saddam Hussein and occupying Iraq.
Why Iraq? 'Largely Oil'
O’Neill began to understand right after Bush’s inauguration when the
discussion among his top advisers abruptly moved to how to divvy up
Iraq’s oil wealth.
Just days into the job, President Bush created the Cheney energy task
force with the stated aim of developing “a national energy policy
designed to help the private sector.” Typically, Cheney has been able
to keep secret its deliberations and even the names of its members.
But a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit forced the Commerce
Department to turn over task force documents, including a map of
Iraqi oilfields, pipelines, refineries, terminals, and potential
areas for exploration; a Pentagon chart “Foreign Suitors for Iraqi
Oilfield Contracts”; and another chart detailing Iraqi oil and gas
projects—all dated March 2001.
On the 60 Minutes program on Dec. 15, 2002, Steve Croft asked then-
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, “What do you say to people who
think this [the coming invasion of Iraq] is about oil?” Rumsfeld
replied:
“Nonsense. It just isn’t. There—there—there are
certain............. things like that, myths that are floating
around. I’m glad you asked. I—it has nothing to do with oil,
literally nothing to do with oil.”
Au Contraire
Greenspan’s indiscreet remark adds to the abundant evidence that Iraq
oil, and not weapons of mass destruction, was the priority target
long before the Bush administration invoked WMD as a pretext to
invade Iraq.
In the heady days of “Mission Accomplished,” a week after the
president landed on the aircraft carrier, then-Deputy Defense
Secretary Paul Wolfowitz virtually bragged about the deceit during an
interview.
On May 9, 2003, Wolfowitz told Vanity Fair:
“The truth is that for reasons that have a lot to do with the U.S.
government bureaucracy, we settled on the one issue that everyone
could agree on, which was weapons of mass destruction as the core
reason...”
During a relaxed moment in Singapore later that same month, Wolfowitz
reminded the press that Iraq “floats on a sea of oil,” and thus added
to the migraine he had already given folks in the White House PR shop.
But wait. For those of us absorbing more than Fox channel news, the
primacy of the oil factor was a no-brainer.
The limited number of invading troops were ordered to give priority
to securing the oil wells and oil industry infrastructure immediately
and let looters have their way with just about everything else
(including the ammunition storage depots!).
Barely three weeks into the war, Rumsfeld famously answered criticism
for not stopping the looting: “Stuff happens.” No stuff happened to
the Oil Ministry.
Small wonder that, according to O’Neill, Rumsfeld tried hard to
dissuade him from writing his book and has avoided all comment on it.
As for Greenspan’s book, Rumsfeld will find it easier to dodge
questions from the Washington press corps from his sinecure at the
Hoover Institute at Stanford.
Eminence Grise...or Oily
But the other half of what Col. Larry Wilkerson, Colin Powell’s
former chief of staff at the State Department, calls the “Cheney-
Rumsfeld cabal” is still lurking in the shadows.
What changed Cheney’s attitude toward Iraq from his sensible remark
in 1992 when then-Defense Secretary Cheney defended President George
H.W. Bush's decision in 1991 not to follow up the expulsion of Iraqi
troops from Kuwait with the ouster of Saddam Hussein and the conquest
of Iraq.
“How many additional American casualties is Saddam worth?” Cheney
asked in August 1992. “Not that damned many. So I think we got it
right...when the president made the decision that we were not going
to go get bogged down in the problems of trying to take over and
govern Iraq.”
Then, there were Cheney’s revealing, damning remarks as Halliburton's
CEO?
“Oil companies are expected to keep developing enough oil to offset
oil depletion and also to meet new demand,” Cheney said in autumn
1999. “So where is the oil going to come from? Governments and the
national oil companies are obviously in control of 90 percent of the
assets. Oil remains fundamentally a government business. The Middle
East with two-thirds of the world’s oil and the lowest cost is still
where the prize ultimately lies.”
Not only Cheney, but also many of the captains of the oil industry
were looking on Iraq with covetous eyes before the war.
Most forget that the Bush/Cheney administration came in on the heels
of severe shortages of oil and natural gas in the U.S., and the
passing of a milestone at which the United States had just begun
importing more than half of the oil it consumes.
One oil executive confided to a New York Times reporter a month
before the war: “For any oil company, being in Iraq is like being a
kid in F.A.O. Schwarz.”
There were, to be sure, other factors behind the ill-starred attack
on Iraq—the determination to acquire permanent military bases in the
area, for one. But that factor can be viewed as a subset of the
energy motivation.
In other words, the felt need for what the Pentagon prefers to call
“enduring” military bases in the Middle East is a function of its
strategic importance which is a function—you guessed it, a function
of its natural resources. Not only oil, but natural gas and water as
well.
In my opinion, the other major factor in the Bush/Cheney decision to
make war on Iraq was the misguided notion that this would make that
part of the world safer for Israel.
Indeed, the so-called “neo-conservatives” still running U.S. policy
toward the Middle East continue to have great difficulty
distinguishing between what they perceive to be the strategic
interests of Israel and those of the United States.
Why Are Americans Silent?
Could it be that many Americans remain silent because we are
unwilling to recognize the Iraq war as the first of the resource wars
of the 21st century; because we continue to be comfortable hogging
far more than our share of the world’s resources and will look the
other way if our leaders tell us that aggressive war is necessary to
protect that siren-call, “our way of life,” from attack by those who
are just plain jealous?
Perhaps a clue can be found in the remarkable reaction I received
after a lecture I gave two and a half years ago in a very affluent
suburb of Milwaukee. I had devoted much of my talk to what I consider
the most important factoid of this century: the world is running out
of oil.
Afterwards some 20 folks lingered in a small circle to ask follow-up
questions. A persistent, handsomely dressed man, who just would not
let go, dominated the questioning:
"Surely you agree that we need the oil. Then what's your problem?
Some 1,450 killed thus far are far fewer than the toll in Vietnam
where we lost 58,000; it's a small price to pay... a sustainable rate
to bear. What IS your problem?"
I asked the man if he would feel differently if one of those (then)
1,450 killed were his own son. Judging from his abrupt, incredulous
reaction, the suggestion struck him as so farfetched as to be beyond
his ken. “It wouldn’t be my son,” he said.
And that, I believe, is a HUGE part of the problem.
Ray McGovern works with Tell the Word, the publishing arm of the
ecumenical Church of the Saviour in Washington, DC. A former CIA
analyst, he is now on the Steering Group of Veteran Intelligence
Professionals for Sanity. His e-mail is [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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