Greenspan's Inconvenient Truth

Kevin Drum, over at the Washington Monthly blog notes that Bob Woodward has been reading Alan Greenspan's memoir. He writes:

ALL LARGELY ABOUT OIL....Bob Woodward plucks a sentence from Alan Greenspan's forthcoming memoir:

Without elaborating, he writes, "I am saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil."

Now that's a statement that could use some elaboration, isn't it? I guess Greenspan hasn't quite given up his Sphinx-like pose entirely.

(So what's Greenspan's point? I don't think he's suggesting that we invaded Iraq because we wanted to seize control of their oil fields and hand them over to ExxonMobil. More likely, he's making the unexceptional argument that we wouldn't care much about the Middle East in the first place if it didn't have all that oil. But it does, and our economy depends on it, and we long ago decided that protecting our access to that oil was an essential element of our national interest. The Iraq war, as Greenspan notes, is pretty obviously bound up in all of that.)

Drum bangs rather slowly, I think. The point (Woodward's and Greenspan's) is not that the Iraq war was influenced by oil (of course it was!) - as is all US Middle East policy. It is that Greenspan said it is politically incovenient to talk about it. That's the point that merits discussion.

It merits discussion because, as even Republicans and most warmongers acknowledge now, there were no WMDs and there was considerable intelligence and LOTS of other countries telling us there were no WMDs. But our administration wanted to go in anyway.

It merits discussion because not only are Chompsky and Finkelstein ridiculed for suggesting a bias in US Middle East policy, but even people like the Mearsheimer and Walt are being marginalized for their writing.

We should be able to talk about these things openly. There should be no elephants in the room. There should be no inconvenient truths.