Was Iraq all about oil? Look again …

Australia’s Defence Minister, Brendan Nelson, is not the sharpest tool in the box, so people were not really surprised in July when he blurted out that the real motive for invading Iraq was oil.

“Obviously the Middle East itself, not only Iraq but the entire region, is an important supplier of energy, oil in particular, to the rest of the world. Australians and all of us need to think what would happen if there was a premature withdrawal from Iraq,” he said.
Silly old Brendan, off-message again. Didn’t he know that Australia invaded Iraq because of its weapons of mass destruction? No, wait a minute, it was because Saddam Hussein might help Islamist terrorists.

Hang on, forget that, we really went there to bring the blessings of democracy to the Iraqi people, dead or alive. Brendan just mis-spoke himself about the oil.

Fast forward two months, and a rather sharper tool has offered the same analysis. Alan Greenspan, chairman of the US Federal Reserve banking system for 18 years and the high priest of capitalism, puts it quite brutally in his book, The Age of Turbulence.

“Whatever their publicised angst over Saddam Hussein’s ‘weapons of mass destruction’,” Greenspan wrote, “American and British authorities were also concerned about violence in the area that harbours a resource indispensable for the functioning of the world economy. I am saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil.”

What everyone knows? No, that is what everyone has been encouraged to believe, by the protesters and the manipulators alike. And poor old Alan fell for it, too.

New Zealand Herald