Another inconvenient truth

The former Federal Reserve chairman does more than pour oil on the troubled water of George Bush's presidency
Sunday, September 23, 2007

We've come to expect this sort of thing from our barista. Along with our latte and a look at her tattoo, we get political analysis. Much of it concerning the war in Iraq. "It's about the oil, man." (Squirt of steam.) "It's all about the oil."

We weren't expecting this sort of thing from Alan Greenspan.

The fellow who led the Federal Reserve Board from 1987 to 2006, the renowned oracle of obfuscation, was shockingly clear this week. "I am saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows," he said. "The Iraq war is largely about oil."

Talk about your sound bite. This must be what happens when a money mandarin goes peddling a memoir to the masses. Greenspan offered no apology for his uncommon fling with frankness. After all, it's not as if we didn't know it anyway.

George Bush certainly knew it. Not that he ever actually said so, of course. But then, from the start, some people believe this war has worn a Monty Python layer. It's about building democracy in the desert. Nudge, nudge. It's about weapons of mass destruction Wink, wink. Truth be told, the war was -- is -- about many things. It's about a great empire exercising its muscle. It's about revenge, real and imagined. It's about a culture on the wax versus a culture on the wane. And, yes, it's about oil.

Greenspan, whose 531-page "The Age of Turbulence" was published Monday, has long been known for a certain lack of directness. This, after all, is the fellow who told us the best way to foretell an economic downtown was to track the slowing sale of men's underpants. But on our need for oil, Greenspan saw no need to stay undercover. It wasn't just the oil beneath Iraqi sands that was causing consternation, he said. Saddam Hussein cast covetous eyes on the Straits of Hormuz, through which pass almost 20 million gallons of oil each day. Disruption of as few as 4 million barrels a day, Greenspan said, might have caused prices to surge by as much as 50 percent. The result would have been "chaos" in the well-lubricated global village.

There's something even more disquieting than this notion that we were taken to war by a president who didn't believe we were up to swallowing its true cause. It's what Greenspan calls the president's lack of "fiscal discipline" and the "dysfunctional government" over which he rules. We may just be the first country in history that tried to fight a war while cutting taxes. Not once, not twice, but three times.

As we all continue our merry Wal-Mart way, we may not be paying for this war now, because we're borrowing all those billions from the Chinese. But make no mistake, we will be paying for this war later. And we will be doing so for a very long time.

And that's the most inconvenient truth of all.