Alan Greenspan Quotes
I am saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil.
Greenspan, Alan. The Age of Turbulence: Adventures in a New World. Penguin Press, 2007, p. 463.
The inconsistency of the policy logic of attacking Iraq but not the other two countries of the "axis of evil" caused problems for our British allies who preferred justifying the attack on Iraq on its own merit without any linkage to Iran and North Korea. What made the Iraq invasion even more puzzling was that both Iran and North Korea were greater dangers to the United States and expressed a deep animus.
This quotation illustrated the extreme right wing viewpoint of some military leaders, even when the policy was only to enforce a “no fly zone” that had been agreed to by Iraq and the coalition forces. While Looney’s wing would use military force to take Middle East oil, that policy was completely contrary to the Clinton Democratic administration’s position at the time and the Bush Republican administration’s position that followed.
The General’s warning was not taken seriously at the time and the George W. Bush administration made him a persona non grata. But his warning turned out to be very prescient and the United States got so badly bogged down in the Iraq War.
Alan Greenspan is an American economist who served five terms as the 13th Chair of the Federal Reserve of the United States from 1987 to 2006. He works as a private adviser and provides consulting for firms through his company, Greenspan Associates LLC. First appointed Federal Reserve chairman by President Ronald Reagan in August 1987, he was reappointed at successive four-year intervals until retiring on January 31, 2006, after the second-longest tenure in the position (behind William McChesney Martin).
