FINALLY, someone in Washington is willing to mention the elephant in the room.
The rather unlikely person is the recently retired US Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan, who referred to the most inconvenient truth about the current debate over the road ahead in Iraq.
In his just-published memoirs, he writes: 'I am saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: The Iraq war is largely about oil.'
He does not explain his controversial statement - but it is high time some of the high-profile contributors to the debate did. They might begin by studying the most compelling argument put forward in 2002-2003 on the eve of the ill-fated US invasion.
This was not simply that Saddam Hussein was believed to possess weapons of mass destruction (WMDs). It was that these weapons were within a short missile strike of Saudi Arabia's key oilfields.
Mr Kenneth M. Pollack put the case forcefully in a best-selling book published ahead of the 2003 invasion. A former Persian Gulf military analyst for the Central Intelligence Agency, he is currently research director at the Brookings Institution's Saban Centre for Middle East Policy.
In The Threatening Storm: The Case For Invading Iraq (Council on Foreign Relations, Random House, New York, 2002), Mr Pollack noted that a single WMD 'could wipe out 75 to 95 per cent of all Saudi oil production'. That was then estimated to be 5 to 22 per cent of global oil production.
This instantaneous loss, he wrote, 'would cause a global recession probably on the scale of the Great Depression of the 1930s, if not worse'.
Mr Greenspan's failure to elaborate on his statement is unfortunate. It will encourage the left's ever-growing anti- American tribe to focus on such matters as links between the Bush-Cheney administration and Texas oil.
These ties are undeniable, and perhaps explain why some Washington supporters of continuing involvement in Iraq find oil-industry referen-
ces politically 'inconvenient', but they are of secondary importance right now.
And they should not be permitted to keep the question of oil supply out of the discussion. The possibility of a war spreading from Iraq into neighbouring Saudi Arabia's main oil regions seems to me to be the most persuasive case for trying to continue efforts to contain the Sunni-Shi'ite conflict in the country.
Without the oil argument, we are left largely with the case that President George W. Bush put at a triumphalist press conference on April 14, 2004. How odd his words sound now. He said: 'A free Iraq is going to be a major blow for terrorism. It'll change the world.'
He then offered a vision of democratic capitalism spreading from there throughout the Muslim world.
Unfortunately, that argument immediately rang hollow in this part of the world. Warnings in 1954 of what then-president Dwight D. Eisenhower called 'the falling domino principle' failed to work here for communism; why then should it work for Western-style democracy in such a viscerally anti-Western region as West Asia?
By the late 1970s, the 'domino theory' was on history's ash heap in this part of Asia. Rather than create a series of neighbouring communist states, communist armies began fighting one another. The conflicts between Vietnam and Cambodia (1978) and China and Vietnam (1979) were the most memorable examples.
South-east Asia learnt then the lesson that Iraqis have been teaching coalition forces (and, by the way, foreign Al-Qaeda terrorists in Anbar province): that nationalism is a far more powerful political motivation than ideology.
Of course, all this raises the question: If the coalition for-
ces are unwelcome to Iraqi nationalists, why don't they simply leave? There are three reasons, all 'inconvenient' for US politicians and thus perhaps not referred to as often as they should be:
An abrupt withdrawal in Iraq would be savagely complex. Unlike in Vietnam, there would be no relatively robust South Vietnamese army protecting exit routes.
Iraqi nationalism - as distinct from religious and tribal passions - has not had much of a chance to form, given the country's turbulent 86-year history.
Yet most Iraqis seem to want to see such a nationalism emerge. A jointly sponsored ABC News/BBC/NHK poll released last week noted that a 'hopeful sign - and a remarkable one, given the country's troubles - (has been) the continued preference for Iraq to remain a single, unified state with a central government in Baghdad. Sixty-two per cent favour that outcome, about the same as in March'.
Perhaps Iraqis deserve the chance to nurture that nationalism?
The third argument in favour of a continuing effort in Iraq is the one I referred to earlier - that to leave now would be to surrender the region to turbulence that has a very good chance of threatening much of the world's oil and, accordingly, the global economy. Remove Western military forces now and face the increasingly likely prospect that they will soon have to return.
In a recent interview with an Australian TV presenter, Mr Anthony Cordesman, a leading US military strategist with Washington's Centre for Strategic and International Studies, offered a succinct summary of Iraq's prospects. It is worth quoting at length:
'Will it explode into a really serious civil conflict? Possibly. Will people fight it out along ethnic fault lines and drive people of other faiths or sects, ethnicity out of their
area? Will countries like Iran rush into a power vacuum?
'Will Turkey intervene in the north? Will you see Sunnis putting money and arms into the Sunni population? All these things too are possible.
'And I think that's why the United States at this point is still patient. It's because the consequences of rushing out, of not being patient, are so much worse for the Iraqis, for the strategic position in the Gulf and for the US.
'Because when you look at this, this is an area with 60 per cent of the world's proven oil reserves, 40 per cent of its proven gas reserves, and the entire global economy is dependent, to a large degree, on the stability of the Gulf of which Iraq is a key part.'
By the late 1970s, the 'domino theory' was on history's ash heap in this part of Asia. Rather than create a series of neighbouring communist states, communist armies began fighting one another.
