Greenspan Misses Cheney's Memo: Spills the Beans on Oil

A Good Piece
By Ray McGovern

".....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. Sometimes I think it’s hardly anyone.

There are so many, still, who "can’t handle the truth," and that is all too understandable. I have found it a wrenching experience to be forced 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.......

Other Factors Behind the Invasion

There were, to be sure, other factors behind the ill-starred attack on Iraq – the Bush administration’s determination to acquire large, permanent military bases in the area outside of Saudi Arabia, for one. But that factor can be viewed as a subset of the energy motivation – the need to have substantial influence over the extraction and disposition of the oil in Iraq. 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, in turn, is a function – you guessed it – of its natural resources. Not only oil, but natural gas and water as well.

I find the evidence persuasive that 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 "neoconservatives" 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. And in my view, they show themselves extremely myopic on both counts."