Nov 2, 2007
Not Even Cheap Oil
Geoffrey Wheatcroft sums up the debacle that is the Iraq War."We knew the war was built on lies - but to have increased petrol prices as well as terror will surely seal history's verdict."
Wheatcroft concludes:
"Finally there is what has sometimes been dismissed as a conspiracy theory: that it was really a war for oil. This idea looks a little less cranky now that Alan Greenspan, the former head of the Federal Reserve Board, has acknowledged 'what everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil'. But here again, there was no need to await his verdict. After all, the most powerful man in British politics had told us the same thing even before the war began. 'The greatest thing to come out of this for the world economy,' said Rupert Murdoch, 'would be $20 a barrel for oil.'
"And so, on top of the whole list of false predictions and collapsed justifications, we have this final absurdity. As both Greenspan and Murdoch have very likely noticed, the price of oil hit a record $96 a barrel yesterday, and is still going up.
"In April 2003, our previous prime minister confidently pronounced that 'just as we had a strategy for war, so we have a strategy for peace'. It is not pre-empting the judgment of history to say with even greater confidence that no good whatever has come out of this war, that no single good reason for it can any longer be adduced - and that 'we' had never had any plan at all, not to say the faintest idea what 'we' were doing."
Wheatcroft concludes:
"Finally there is what has sometimes been dismissed as a conspiracy theory: that it was really a war for oil. This idea looks a little less cranky now that Alan Greenspan, the former head of the Federal Reserve Board, has acknowledged 'what everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil'. But here again, there was no need to await his verdict. After all, the most powerful man in British politics had told us the same thing even before the war began. 'The greatest thing to come out of this for the world economy,' said Rupert Murdoch, 'would be $20 a barrel for oil.'
"And so, on top of the whole list of false predictions and collapsed justifications, we have this final absurdity. As both Greenspan and Murdoch have very likely noticed, the price of oil hit a record $96 a barrel yesterday, and is still going up.
"In April 2003, our previous prime minister confidently pronounced that 'just as we had a strategy for war, so we have a strategy for peace'. It is not pre-empting the judgment of history to say with even greater confidence that no good whatever has come out of this war, that no single good reason for it can any longer be adduced - and that 'we' had never had any plan at all, not to say the faintest idea what 'we' were doing."