Greenspan Spills the Beans on Bush and Oil.

By Ray McGovern,

09/16/07 "ICH" -- -- For those still wondering why President George W.
Bush and Vice President *** 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.
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.

60 Minutes

On January 11, 2004, viewers of CBS' 60 Minutes saw another of Bush's
senior economic advisers, former treasury secretary Paul O'Neill
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." How does he manage? Cheney and "a
praetorian guard that encircled the president" 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 that 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 better 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 December 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..."

That was seven weeks after the invasion; no weapons of mass
destruction had been found; and Americans were growing tired of being
told that this was because Iraq was the size of California.
Eventually, of course, Wolfowitz' boss Rumsfeld was forced to concede,
as he did to me during our impromptu TV debate on May 4, 2006: "It
appears that there were not weapons of mass destruction there."

But three years before, during that heady May of 2003 when all else
seemed to be going along swimmingly, the inebriation of apparent
success led to another glaring indiscretion by Wolfowitz. During a
relaxed moment in Singapore late that 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

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 mind
toward Iraq from his sensible attitude after the Gulf War when, as
defense secretary, he defended President George H. W. Bush's decision
not to attempt to oust Saddam Hussein and conquer Iraq? Here is what
Cheney said in August 1992:

"...how many additional American casualties is Saddam worth?...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."

Cheney's rather transparent remarks as CEO of Halliburton in autumn
1999 suggest what lies behind the cynical exploitation of genuine
patriotism to recruit throwaway soldiers to trade for the chimera of
control over the oil in Iraq:

"Oil companies are expected to keep developing enough oil to offset
oil depletion and also to meet new demand...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 people
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."

Canadian writer Linda McQuaig, author of It's the Crude, Dude: War,
Big Oil, and the Fight for the Planet (2004), has noted that decades
from now it will seem to everyone a real no-brainer. Historians will
calmly discuss the war in Iraq and identify oil as one of the key
factors in the decision to launch it. They will point to growing US
dependence on foreign oil, the competition with China, India, and
others for a share of the diminishing world supply of this precious,
nonrenewable resource, and the fact that Iraq "floats on a sea of
oil." It will all seem so obvious as to provoke little more than a
yawn.

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 "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. And in my view, they show themselves extremely myopic
on both counts.

Why Are Americans Silent?

Could it be that most of us Americans remain "good Germans" because we
are unwilling to recognize the moral implications of starting what is
likely to be 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 natural resources?; and because we prefer to look the
other way when 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 the
implications of what I consider the most important factoid of this
century: the world is running out of oil.

Afterwards some twenty folks lingered in a small circle to ask follow-
up questions. A persistent, elegantly 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 the (then)
1,450 already 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.

An earlier, shorter version of this article has appeared on
Consortiumnews.com

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