Alan Greenspan, the former Federal Reserve chairman, said in an interview that the removal of Saddam Hussein had been “essential” to secure world oil supplies, a point he emphasized to the White House in private conversations before the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Greenspan, who was the country’s top voice on monetary policy at the time Bush decided to go to war in Iraq, has refrained from extensive public comment on it until now, but he made the striking comment in a new memoir out today that “the Iraq War is largely about oil.” In the interview, he clarified that sentence in his 531-page book, saying that while securing global oil supplies was “not the administration’s motive,” he had presented the White House with the case for why removing Hussein was important for the global economy. “I was not saying that that’s the administration’s motive,” Greenspan said in an interview Saturday, “I’m just saying that if somebody asked me, ‘Are we fortunate in taking out Saddam?’ I would say it was essential.” He said that in his discussions with President Bush and Vice President Cheney, “I have never heard them basically say, ‘We’ve got to protect the oil supplies of the world,’ but that would have been my motive.” Greenspan said that he made his economic argument to White House officials and that one lower-level official, whom he declined to identify, told him, “Well, unfortunately, we can’t talk about oil.” Asked if he had made his point to Cheney specifically, Greenspan said yes, then added, “I talked to everybody about that.” Greenspan said he had backed Hussein’s ouster, either through war or covert action. “I wasn’t arguing for war per se,” he said. But “to take [Hussein] out, in my judgment, it was something important for the West to do and essential, but I never saw Plan B” — an alternative to war. Greenspan’s reference in “The Age of Turbulence: Adventures in a New World” to what he calls the “politically inconvenient” fact that the war was “largely about oil” was first reported by The Washington Post on Saturday and has proved controversial.
More in today’s WSJ. An excerpt:
WASHINGTON — Former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan spent much of the past 40 years as an influential economic adviser to both Republicans and Democrats, but today feels estranged from both. News coverage of his memoir has focused on his criticism of Republicans for forsaking their small-government principles. But in an interview with The Wall Street Journal, Mr. Greenspan expressed just as much dismay with the Democratic Party.Mr. Greenspan, a self-described libertarian Republican, said he was “fairly close” to President Clinton’s economic advisers — Treasury secretaries Robert Rubin and Lawrence Summers and Deputy Treasury Secretary Roger Altman. “The Clinton administration was a pretty centrist party,” he said. “But they’re not governing again. The next administration may have the Clinton administration name but the Democratic Party…has moved…very significantly in the wrong direction,” he said, referring to the Democratic Party’s populist bent, especially its skepticism of free trade.
Couple other good links from the WSJ – Here the WSJ fact checks the Greenspan book, and here the WSJ provides excerpts from media interviews that Mr. Greenspan has given recently.
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