Iraq War: It's All About Oil, Says US Top Economist

Former United States Federal Reserve Board Chairman Alan Greenspan has his life finally put on paper and he has salient points to affirm there that got the whole world listening, or wanting to listen to. In his newly-released memoir “Age of Turbulence: Adventures In A New World”, Greenspan sharply points out the Bush administrations’ misguided inclination towards overspending and further criticizes the Republicans in Capitol Hill to have had sacrificed principles for pecuniary and political gains and ended up with neither in the end.

When Alan Greenspan speaks, everybody listens. As a federal economists, Greenspan had accumulated enormous reputation for being such a great financial strategists and many sees him as the one single entity that had kept the American economy afloat all those years he was in service, despite the occurrence of major disturbances that had threatened it every now and then, like the Black Monday crash of 1987 and the boom-and-bust onslaught of the so-called dot.com economic expansion.

The most telling of all revelation in this memoir is the pronouncement by the author himself about how the Iraq War was all about or mostly because of oil. And if Alan Greenspan says so, there would always be great probability to it. Except if the economic genius has just gotten too old and weak in the head that now, he is just merely saying nonsense, like most old people do.

If you ask me, I wouldn’t be so surprise if in fact US President Bush’s military venturing into Iraq is mainly caused by the need for oil, or in protection of the oil industry either domestically in the US, or in general, for as a matter of fact, President Bush himself was once top oil executive, just like his father. He may have brought some of his old private agendas into the White House, either willfully or not. That would be not so difficult to fathom.

But what I have got a problem with is how President Bush had been posturing a different agenda all along in risking lives of American soldiers into danger zones and wasting enormous resources, such as the heroic push for democracy in the Middle East or in defense of the Homeland. It would be monumental hypocrisy if in fact Mr. Greenspan was right, and President Bush was just pretending all along to be dutiful in waging a huge and costly war in Iraq. Maybe the heavy military spending in Iraq is one symptom of the alleged inclination of the Republicans to overspend and defy any reasonable economic restraint.

For now, it is just a memoir and we all know that in any biography or autobiography, anyone can just say whatever he or she wants to say. But I am just wary that in this case, the famous person behind the memoir is not just another ageing American actor or actress, or a balding American athlete, but someone who everybody listens to whenever he opens his mouth.

Let us see how President Bush would respond to this latest smoldering issue against him and his military venture into Iraq.