Greenspan: It's About The Oil

It's finally been said.

Former Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan is quoted in the Washington Post:

I am saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil.

He's also got a few choice words about DC at the time he left office. DC, in his words was:

harboring a dysfunctional government

And for the GOP:

Greenspan accuses the Republicans who presided over the party's majority in the House until last year of being too eager to tolerate excessive federal spending in exchange for political opportunity. The Republicans, he says, deserved to lose control of the Senate and House in last year's elections. "The Republicans in Congress lost their way," Greenspan writes. "They swapped principle for power. They ended up with neither."

He singles out J. Dennis Hastert, the Illinois Republican who was House speaker until January, and Tom DeLay, the Texan who was majority leader until he resigned after being indicted for violating campaign finance laws in his home state.

"House Speaker Hastert and House majority leader Tom DeLay seemed readily inclined to loosen the federal purse strings any time it might help add a few more seats to the Republican majority," he writes.

Then there's this from the NYTimes:

Mr. Greenspan also spelled out his own views about the war in Iraq: he supported the invasion, he says, not because Saddam Hussein might have had weapons of mass destruction, but because Saddam had shown a clear desire to capture the Middle East’s oil fields.

Oil - it was about the oil. And:

“I’m just very disappointed,” he said glumly, as he sat in his living room. “Smaller government, lower spending, lower taxes, less regulation — they had the resources to do it, they had the knowledge to do it, they had the political majorities to do it. And they didn’t.”

In the end, he said, “political control trumped policy, and they achieved neither political control nor policy.”

The war's about oil, Republican governance is "dysfunctional" and the Republicans were too eager to trade principle for power. Political control trumped policy.

And this guy's a REPUBLICAN!