“Finally, let’s put the cherry on the cake. Indeed, there is a most disturbing piece in former Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan’s recent Memoirs (The Age of Turbulence) and in the explanations he gave in interviews granted to promote his book, and it is his confession that while he was acting chairman of the Fed he actively lobbied Vice President Dick Cheney for a U.S. attack on Iraq. If this was the case, it was most inappropriate for a central banker to act this way, especially when he had other things to do than lobbying in favor of an illegal war. Does it mean that Mr. Greenspan was an active member of the pro-Israel Lobby within the U.S. government and joined the Wolfowitz-Feith-Abrams-Perle-Kissinger cabal? It would seem to me that such behavior would call for an investigation.

Indeed, to what extent was the pro-Israel Lobby responsible for the Iraq war and the deficits it generated? Already, polls indicate that forty percent of American voters believe the pro-Israel Lobby has been a key factor in going to war in Iraq and that it is now very active in promoting a new war against Iran. This figure is bound to rise as more and more people confront the facts behind this most disastrous and ill-conceived war. Indeed, how many wars can this lobby be allowed to engineer before being stopped? And, to what extent can the current financial turmoil in U.S. and world markets be traced back to the influence of this most corrosive lobby?”

More by Rodrigue Tremblay at The New American Empire.

Comment:

Tremblay’s argument is simply an extension of the Mearsheimer-Walt thesis about the influence of the Israeli lobby, which has come in from criticism both from the right and left – at best, as an overbroad generalization, at worst, as a form of not-so-covert anti-semitism.

The latter charge, in my opinion, is only reflexive ad hominem. But the other is more plausible.

It is not clear to me how Israel actually benefited from the Iraq war. In fact, it seems to have substantially lost – Iran is a good deal more influential and powerful in the neighborhood and civil war and terrorism has made the whole region more dangerous. As for “creative destruction” in the Middle East, it might seem like a good thing for someone in the US, but no Israeli could possibly find it an advantage.

Financiers, bankers, and defense contractors have always profited from war.

That AIPAC and the rest are powerful is not arguable. But it’s perfectly legitimate for any group to organize and promote its interests, as Mearsheimer and Walt do concede themselves. And there is no reason that a state should not have allies or special alliances, based on any number of factors — shared geo-political interests, cultural or historic ties, military alliances… That has always been a feature of the state system. There is a strong tie between the US and the UK, but no one especially complains about a British lobby (maybe they do and I haven’t heard…).

And I don’t recall anyone complaining about Brzezinski – a Pole in origin – influencing US policy in an excessively anti-Russian manner, or about the “Pakistani lobby” influencing policy against India. Or the old China lobby of the interwar years.

So – Greenspan as an active part of an Israeli lobby part doesn’t quite fly, to my mind. But Greenspan as part of a Wall Street-Treasury-Big Media (remember that fawning Time magazine cover “The Committee to Save the World”?) crony system does…..

That makes Greenspan’s comments blaming “oil” for the Iraq war very interesting. Of course, the war was not pushed for by oil interests, contrary to the usual left-socialist critique. The oil interests in the Bush I administration (Baker, for eg.) were notably against destabilizing the region. There was simply nothing to be gained by it, says this oil industry consultant, as well as this energy security researcher, in terms of improved access that the US did not already have. Oil companies probably make less of a profit and at greater risk to themselves than many other companies – especially defense contractors, and certainly, the financial industry.

[Revision: On rereading this, I think I am committing a logical fallacy here. It’s perfectly possible that oil industry experts thought that the oil business as a whole would be destabilized, while the Bush team (with a high number of officials with vested interests in oil) felt that their particular oil companies could seize post-war control, and gain profits that would make the war-time disruption worth it to them. In other words, direct oil profits for those companies could have been a motive too. That would not take away from the criticism of the banks, of course. But Greenspan’s remarks would then be more in the way of finger- pointing between two sets of elites each with their motivations for war and each with responsibility for it – but one tied to the Republicans and one tied more to the Democrats].

So, the attempt to put the blame on “oil” seems to me to be an attempt by Greenspan to deflect attention from the financialization of the economy during his watch at the Fed, when the banking system was consolidated in an unprecedented manner (through Glass-Steagall pushed through by people like Robert Rubin, part of that famous committee on the Time cover, and through “Financial Modernization” legislation actively sponsored by Senator Gramm and Greenspan, which effectively led to the Enron fiasco). At the same time, the revolving door between the US government and banks like Citigroup and Goldman Sachs became even more extensive.

The war was less about oil than about which currency pays for oil, and thus, for everything else — it was about the future of the dollar as a reserve currency.

Greenspan effectively scammed dollar-holders all over the world by shucking off US debt onto them (including the bail -out of the big banks in the various debt crises in the 1990s in Russia, Mexico, Brazil, Thailand, etc. etc., as well as the costs of war and occupation in the Middle East), while also diluting the value of that debt. Then, with the establishment of a military presence in the Middle East, the US gets to sabre-rattle at any country (read, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Iran, and by extension, other countries with close ties/oil agreements with that region) that might be considering moving its reserve currency out of dollars into euros (that was what Saddam was planning to do, by the way, on the eve of the war).

Not so much access to oil, but control over others’ access to and payment for oil.

Why is that an important distinction? Because if big oil needs war to extend its markets that seems to subtantiate the left critique of capitalism, per se. But if big oil itself is not the problem but rather the government-corporate complex that manages the financial system and adjudicates where and how the rewards flow, then the problem is not capitalism as such, but the corporate-state and the financial managers of the global managed (i.e. collectivized) economy.

Our of deference to our left-libertarian allies in the antiwar movement, I will not call that socialism (which, in its anarchist version, right libertarians cannot philosophically object to).

I will call that global collectivism.

Taken together with the unprecedented erosion of civil liberties in the US, the stranglehold of propaganda over big media, and the network of police agencies and states involved in the war on the terror, this financial system could (given a few developments) provide the underpinning for a totalitarian state. (Even as it is now, it certainly doesn’t represent individualism or free markets).

I am quite optimistic that such a totalitarian system will not ultimately arise, simply because of the existence and strengthening of so many other centers of power in the world financial markets. On the other hand, the jockeying for power between them all is likely to create shocks of an unpredictable kind…