Iraq, oil and the Bush administration

Jack Miles
Sunday, January 4, 2009

"I am saddened," former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan wrote in his memoir, "that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil."

Greenspan was certainly right that in the Bush administration, oil has been a love that dared not speak its name. One searches long and hard in the president's many Iraq speeches to find a single occurrence of the vulgar word "oil." With a Victorian delicacy, the administration has preferred, when it could not avoid the gross topic altogether, to employ polite circumlocutions such as "mineral resources" or lofty obfuscations such as "patrimony."