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Greenspan Disappoints His New Liberal Supporters
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by joellerose | September 17, 2007 at 10:02 am
259 views | 4 Recommendations | 4 comments
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By Bob Woodward
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, September 17, 2007; A03 (Excerpt)
Alan Greenspan, the former Federal Reserve chairman, said in an interview that the removal of Saddam Hussein had been "essential" to secure world oil supplies, a point he emphasized to the White House in private conversations before the 2003 invasion of Iraq.
Greenspan, who was the country's top voice on monetary policy at the time Bush decided to go to war in Iraq, has refrained from extensive public comment on it until now, but he made the striking comment in a new memoir out today that "the Iraq War is largely about oil." In the interview, he clarified that sentence in his 531-page book, saying that while securing global oil supplies was "not the administration's motive," he had presented the White House with the case for why removing Hussein was important for the global economy.
"I was not saying that that's the administration's motive," Greenspan said in an interview Saturday, "I'm just saying that if somebody asked me, 'Are we fortunate in taking out Saddam?' I would say it was essential."
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Most RecentMost Recommended Comments (4)
at 10:19 on September 17th, 2007
joellerose, I like this story. It's good stuff.
at 12:21 on September 17th, 2007
Thanks for this joelerose. It's called the "Washington Squirm"! Do you think he is saying that the war was economically "essential"? Maybe that's just my spin on it. Either way I like that answer more than the WMD argument we had to live with.
at 12:12 on September 17th, 2007
joellerose, I like this story. It's good stuff.
at 13:19 on September 17th, 2007
I fail to see this as confirmation of a non-existing liberal or progressive "support" for Mr. Greenspan. He simply clarified the accusations of many American as well as foreign critics of the invasion and occupation. This was at its base about American big business and their access to Iraqi natural resources, namely petroleum. The organised left did not need Mr. Greenspan to say what was obvious to anyone investigating this conflict. Halliburton and Turner, Brown and Root and all of the subdivisions of these firms are reporting record profits while the Americans and Iraqis "in the field" are suffering one of the worse preventable national disasters in modern history.
Unless one is a direct stockholder in the extraction of Iraqi oil proceeds and even if so, where is the moral or ethical justification for viewing a murderous military operation as something to cheer about when the only people benefiting from all this are the very energy companies involved? Either the "mission" as outlined by The Decider is WMD's (false), the spread of American-style democracy or access to Iraq's oil. The mission statment has changed officially several times and even the media General of the moment has openly admitted that he cannot say for certain that the American invasion and occupation of the nation in question has made the U.S. any safer. He nor Mr. Greenspan has said much of anything that anti-War activists such as Cindy Sheehan, a Gold-Star mother who demands that the administration honestly explain to the American people why the U.S. is in Iraq, has been speculating on even before the start of the invasion.
Mr. Greenspan still remains on the bad side of the progressive movement and will remain there given his record of currency inflation and direction in the reduction of social programmes in favour of big business subsidies and investment. Most recent evaluations of his tenure blame him in regads to the housing credit crisis. Not highlights of a hero to the actively political left.