Sep 16 2007
Greenspan admits Iraq was about oil, as deaths put at 1.2m
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By Peter Beaumont and Joanna Walters in New York
Sunday September 16, 2007
The Observer | GUARDIAN Unlimited [U.K.]
The man once regarded as the world’s most powerful banker has bluntly declared that the Iraq war was ‘largely’ about oil.
Appointed by Ronald Reagan in 1987 and retired last year after serving four presidents, Alan Greenspan has been the leading Republican economist for a generation and his utterings instantly moved world markets.
In his long-awaited memoir - out tomorrow in the US - Greenspan, 81, who served as chairman of the US Federal Reserve for almost two decades, writes: ‘I am saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil.’
In The Age of Turbulence: Adventures in a New World, he is also crystal clear on his opinion of his last two bosses, harshly criticising George W Bush for ‘abandoning fiscal constraint’ and praising Bill Clinton’s anti-deficit policies during the Nineties as ‘an act of political courage’. He also speaks of Clinton’s sharp and ‘curious’ mind, and ‘old-fashioned’ caution about the dangers of debt.
Greenspan’s damning comments about the war come as a survey of Iraqis, which was released last week, claims that up to 1.2 million people may have died because of the conflict in Iraq - lending weight to a 2006 survey in the Lancet that reported similarly high levels.
More than one million deaths were already being suggested by anti-war campaigners, but such high counts have consistently been rejected by US and UK officials. The estimates, extrapolated from a sample of 1,461 adults around the country, were collected by a British polling agency, ORB, which asked a random selection of Iraqis how many people living in their household had died as a result of the violence rather than from natural causes.
Previous estimates gave a range between 390,000 and 940,000, the most prominent of which - collected by the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and reported in the Lancet in October 2006 - suggested 654,965 deaths.
Although the household survey was carried out by a polling organisation, rather than researchers, it has again raised the spectre that the 2003 invasion has caused a far more substantial death toll than officially acknowledged.
The ORB survey follows an earlier report by the organisation which suggested that one in four Iraqi adults had lost a family member to violence. The latest survey suggests that in Baghdad that number is as high as one in two. If true, these latest figures would suggest the death toll in Iraq now exceeds that of the Rwandan genocide in which about 800,000 died.
The Lancet survey was criticised by some experts and by George Bush and British officials. In private, however, the Ministry of Defence’s chief scientific adviser Sir Roy Anderson described it as ‘close to best practice’.
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SO MUCH FOR 60 MINUTES
I just finished watching the latest 60 Minutes (CBS, 9.16.07) featuring only two stories, one on Alan Greenspan, former Fed reserve helmsman, and the other on sharks and their vanishing numbers due to unconscionable numbers being killed (often illegally) to supply Chinese restaurants with “sharkfin soup,” a coveted delicacy.
While the latter report, filed by Bob Simon, always a reliable journalist, was impeccable for its balance, urgency, and truth, the report by Leslie Stahl, still a knockout at 65, and far prettier than she is a good journalist, was a heavy but not unexpected disappointment.
Leslie Stahl and Diane Sawyer remain the doyennes of the first generation of “TV babes”. Many people wonder legitimately if these women (or men) could have ever climbed those professional heights without those Ken & Barbie looks.
Essentially, Stahl’s report, which took an unusual 27 minutes, and which delved into many aspects of Greenspan’s life eschewed the most important piece of news attaching to Greenspan and his book, his candid admission that the Iraq Wars have all along been about oil.
This important news, laid out in the above essay, has been circulating all over the Net for the last 48 hours and couldn”t possibly be missed by a major news organization such as CBS. It’s right there in the book. Here’s another typical report in wide circulation (this one from a British site) which Leslie and her ever so-unbiased crew apparently “missed”:
Stahl’s “forgetfullness” about this highly important issue is as typical of the American media establishment as it is repugnant, even criminal, considering the dimensions of the massacre we are perpetrating in Iraq, under the usual false pretenses. Equally, for the political establishment, especially the presidential candidates, it speaks volumes about what they are made of. For if they don’t notice something like this, they are poor choices to lead Bolivia, let alone the US (no offense to Bolivia); and if they DID notice the item and kept mum, they are what we have thought in this blog for a long time: prostitutes to the system posturing as real options.
I attach below, a complete article on this topic, as published in the WSWS site and also simulposted elsewhere on this site (The Greanville Journal):
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World Socialist Web Site www.wsws.org
WSWS : News & Analysis : North America
A deafening silence on report of one million Iraqis killed under US occupation
By Patrick Martin
17 September 2007
When those responsible for the American war in Iraq face a public reckoning for their colossal crimes, the weekend of September 15-16, 2007 will be an important piece of evidence against them. On Friday, September 14 there were brief press reports of a scientific survey by the British polling organization ORB, which resulted in an estimate of 1.2 million violent deaths in Iraq since the US invasion.
This staggering figure demonstrates two political facts: 1) the American war in Iraq has produced a humanitarian catastrophe of historic proportions, with a death total already higher than that in Rwanda in 1994; 2) those arguing against a US withdrawal on the grounds that this would lead to civil war, even genocide, are deliberately concealing the fact that such a bloodbath is already taking place, with the US military in control.
The reaction to the ORB report in the US political and media establishment was virtual silence. After scattered newspaper reports Friday, there was no coverage on the Friday evening television newscasts or on the cable television news stations. There was no comment from the Bush White House, the Pentagon, or the State Department, and not a single Republican or Democratic presidential candidate or congressional leader made an issue of it. On the Sunday morning talk shows on all four broadcast networks the subject was not raised.
This was not because those involved were unaware of the study, which received wide circulation on the Internet and was prominently reported in the British daily press. Nor was there any serious challenge to the validity of the study’s findings.
Opinion Research Business (ORB), founded by the former head of British operations for the Gallup polling organization, is a well-established commercial polling firm. It gave a detailed technical description of the methods used to make a scientific random sample.
Six months ago, by contrast, an ORB survey in Iraq was hailed by the White House because some of its findings could be given a positive spin in administration propaganda. That survey, conducted in February and made public March 18 in the Sunday Times of London, found that only 27 percent of Iraqis believed their country was in a state of civil war and that a majority supported the Maliki government and the US military “surge,” and believed life was getting better in their country.
That survey also reported figures on violence that largely dovetail with those of the survey conducted in August and reported last Friday, including 79 percent of Baghdad residents experiencing either a violent death or kidnapping in their immediate family or workplace. But its findings of Iraqi political opinions—not the figures on deaths—were given headline treatment in the US press, with articles in the Washington Post, the Christian Science Monitor and other national media outlets.
White House press spokesman Tony Snow cited the ORB poll at a March 23 news briefing, when he used its findings to rebut the results of a poll of Iraqis by ABC News, the British Broadcasting Corporation, the German ARD network and USA Today newspaper. Asked about the ABC poll’s finding that Iraqis were more pessimistic about the future, Snow declared, “there was also a British poll at the same time that had almost diametrically opposed results.” He added that the British poll had “twice the sample” of the ABC poll, and should therefore be considered more authoritative.
The March ORB poll was widely hailed in the far-right media, including Fox News Network. The right-wing magazine National Review declared, “Supporters of Operation Iraqi Freedom will be buoyed by a new poll of Iraqis showing high levels of support for the Baghdad security plan and the elected government implementing it.”
The latest ORB poll, focusing on the enormous death toll produced by the US invasion, has received no such positive reception at the White House. There is, of course, ample reason for such hostility. The figures reported by ORB undermine Bush administration claims that its goal in Iraq is to “liberate” the Iraqi people from tyranny and terrorism, or to defend “freedom and democracy.”
The real motivation for the war was spelled out by former Federal Reserve Board chairman Alan Greenspan in a newly published book of memoirs, in which he wrote, “Whatever their publicized angst over Saddam Hussein’s ‘weapons of mass destruction,’ American and British authorities were also concerned about violence in an area that harbors a resource indispensable for the functioning of the world economy. I’m saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: The Iraq war is largely about oil.”
Equally significant is the silence from congressional Democrats and the Democratic presidential candidates, all of whom claim to be opposed to the Iraq war. This antiwar posturing, however, has nothing in common with genuine compassion for the plight of the Iraqi people or principled opposition to the predatory interests of American imperialism in the oil-rich country.
The Democrats oppose the Bush administration’s conduct of the war, not because it has been a bloody and criminal operation, but because it has been mismanaged and unsuccessful in accomplishing the goal of plundering Iraq’s oil resources and strengthening the strategic position of US imperialism in the Middle East.
The Democrats do not want to highlight the massive scale of the bloodbath in Iraq, as suggested by the ORB survey, because they share political responsibility for the war, from the vote to authorize the use of force in October 2002, to the repeated congressional passage of bills to fund the war, at a total cost of more than $600 billion. In any war crimes trial over the near-genocide in Iraq, leading Democrats would take their place in the dock, second only to the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld war cabal.
Appearing on NBC’s “Meet the Press” program Sunday, the 2004 Democratic presidential candidate, Senator John Kerry, denounced suggestions that congressional Democrats would allow the United States to be defeated in Iraq. He criticized the Bush administration’s conduct of the war on the ground that it had weakened US national security interests, particularly in relation to Iran.
“We’re not talking about abandoning Iraq,” Kerry said. “We’re talking about changing the mission and adjusting the mission so that the bulkier combat troops are withdrawn, ultimately, within a year, but that you are continuing to provide the basic backstop support necessary to finish the training, so they stand up on their own, and you are continuing to chase Al Qaeda.”
Kerry made it clear that he advocated a more aggressive, not less aggressive, policy in the Middle East. “We need to get out of Iraq in order to be stronger to deal with Iran,” he said, “in order to deal with Hezbollah and Hamas, to regain our credibility in the region. And I believe, very deeply, they understand power.”
When “Meet the Press” host Tim Russert pressed Kerry on the refusal of the Democrats to force the White House to stop the war by cutting off funding, Kerry evaded the question, claiming—falsely—that such action would require 67 votes in the Senate to override a presidential veto. The supposed 67-vote hurdle is an obstacle deliberately conjured up by the congressional Democrats, in order to play their double game of publicly posturing as opponents of the war while allowing the Bush administration to continue waging it.
Kerry continued: “I will fund the troops to protect the national security interests of America, to accomplish a mission that increases our national security and protects the troops themselves. We are not proposing failure…”
What does the pursuit of “success” mean in the context of the reports of 1.2 million violent deaths in Iraq since the US invasion and occupation? It means the devastation of that country will continue until the American and international working class intervenes to put an end to it.
“It’s the media stupid”
How in the world do they kick sand over a statement like this from Greenspan?
‘I am saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil.’
I stand in awe of the corporate media. Further, at the risk of sounding minimally disgusting (in light of how overwhelmingly disgusting the fall of this empire has become) our citizens may as well be filling our gas tanks with blood. Is that our fault as a nation? YES. Is everyone to blame? Probably. Are some (the top 10%) more to blame as opposed to others? Definitely. Does that mean you, or I are off the hook for the crimes of the plutocrats? NO.
All of this carnage, and plundering is too repulsive for words. This country leaves you feeling like “life is truly worth losing”, but unfortunately the burden of depression, angst, and misery some of us (those not trying to rationalize this massacre from a safe distance) pales in comparison to what the people of Iraq are feeling. There is no time to feel bad, or sad in today’s day and age - mourning is a luxury long past, and therefore the anger we feel must be channeled into action. With what little energy we have left, it must all be invested into overthrowing this monster of a system with expediency, starting with the media, or at least doing our best to circumvent them - with vigor.
As the saying goes…”Fuck the corporate media”.
Hey, Paul D., “All of this carnage and plundering is too repulsive for words” is exactly right. Imagine if the $$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$ squared, spent destroying Iraqis simply to plunder their oil were applied to new clean energy technologies—but shifting of profits from CorpoWorld plutocrats to The People and the Planet means The People will have to exercise some great intelligence and will, maybe even have to make sacrifices. Intelligence, will and sacrifice have been leached from the American herd, however, so…look at Iraq; what goes around, comes around. Unfortunately, because of the evil of a few “leaders” and their controllers, and somnambulence of the many, American karma is plumbing new depths of horror. Every American accepting the propaganda and looking the other way…too repulsive for words….
When a country loses its conscience, nothing else can be saved; or even, perhaps, is worth saving?
America, land of the….(filling-in-blanks, anyone)?
Left gatekeepers propagated the myth the war was about oil. The truth is zionists like Greenspan have dragged the West into The Middle East Conflict on Israel’s side, on the back of a series of false flag terror attacks in the West blamed on ‘Muslim Terror’. Thats the truth. Thats why you don’t hear it.
Do you really think this isn’t staged? You really think Alan Greenspan, one of the founding members of the Trilateral Commission, just decides to come out and minimize the issue to oil, denounce the out-of-power Republican Congress, and embark on a massive book/interview tour. Greenspan speaks about recent fiscal policies as if he didn’t know what was going to happen. Please. This is a rodeo show. Keep throwing the blame at individuals, or oil, or pride, politics - whatever. All of these distract the people from the corruption and hidden power of the money system.
Dave, you have a very agile mind, and I give you credit for it, but one of these days you’ll begin to suspect yourself! You say, in lapidary tone:
“Keep throwing the blame at individuals, or oil, or pride, politics - whatever. All of these distract the people from the corruption and hidden power of the money system…”
Individuals are in the final analysis what makes a system a system: it’s individuals who form the plutocracy, jointly and singularly. Second, the problems we face are about oil, pride (national chauvinism), politics (runaway corruption as the system does not represent the class interests of the majority), and the money system…All of these terms are NOT mutually exclusive, but integrated into the filth that is killing us. You are making a distinction where there is no difference. Rethink it.