Greenspan: 'Unfair' of lefty bloggers to use my book to say Bush lied
 Former Chairman of the US Federal Reserve Alan Greenspan believes that it's "unfair" to try and use his book as Exhibit A to make the case that the Bush Administration lied to the public about the real reason why Iraq was invaded.
"I am saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil," Greenspan wrote in his soon-to-be-published memoir, The Age of Turbulence: Adventures in a New World.
Monday morning on NBC's Today Show, Matt Lauer said to Greenspan, "You write a 500-page book and you know what happens. People want to talk about a certain couple of key sentences in that book."
Lauer continued, "Now, as a lifelong libertarian Republican, as the former chairman of the Federal Reserve, you know that when you speak, people are going to listen; they're going to react. Liberal bloggers are having a field day with this. They're saying, 'Here's a Republican saying the administration lied about the reason to go to war.' Is that a spin? Is that fair?"
"It's utterly unfair," Greenspan responded. "I was expressing my view. Saddam Hussein was obviously seeking to get a choke hold on the Straits of Hormuz, where about 18 million barrels a day flow from the Middle East to the industrial world. Had he been able to get hold of a nuclear weapon and indeed move through Kuwait and into Saudi Arabia and control the Straits of Hormuz, it would have caused chaos in the international --"
Lauer interjected, "So are we talking about semantics here, Alan? In other words, the administration went to war saying it was all about weapons of mass destruction."
"I believe that they believed that," Greenspan said. "I'm not saying that they believed it was about oil. I'm saying it is about oil and that I believe it was necessary to get Saddam out of there."
Lauer offered, "Maybe the better way to put it -- it was about stability. It was about stability in a region. And whether it was about weapons of mass destruction, destabilizing that region or oil, it's all about stability."
"Absolutely," Lauer agreed.
Reporting for the UK's Times, Gerard Baker notes, "The excitement that that seems to have caused in some sections of the media might be tempered by his somewhat testy acknowledgement earlier in the book that he was left out of the inner circle of policy advisers around President Bush."
"Back to the subject of oil, you say if the war in Iraq was all about oil, some people say, 'Then why are we facing $80 a gallon right now -- a barrel right now?'" NBC's Lauer asked Greenspan. "You make the point that if we hadn't gone to war, we might be facing $130, $140 a barrel. Correct?"
"Correct," Greenspan agreed.
Lauer continued, "And you think that would have been a real possibility."
"Absolutely," Greenspan said. "The way I read Saddam, that's where he was going."
This video is from NBC's Today Show, broadcast September 17.
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