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It Was Oil, All Along

You can fool people some of the time, but not all the time. Now, in this technological age, it is easy to access and recall statements made whenever and however far back.

So, some words of key players in the lead up to the Iraq War have re-surfaced and Bill Moyers and Michael Winship recall in their piece on truthout "It Was Oil, All Along" on the Iraq War and that it was oil which led the world getting into the mess it now is in and with that war-torn country.

"Oh, no, they told us, Iraq isn't a war about oil. That's cynical and simplistic, they said. It's about terror and al-Qaeda and toppling a dictator and spreading democracy and protecting ourselves from weapons of mass destruction. But one by one, these concocted rationales went up in smoke, fire and ashes. And now the bottom line turns out to be ... the bottom line. It is about oil.

Alan Greenspan said so last fall. The former chairman of the Federal Reserve, safely out of office, confessed in his memoir, "Everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil." He elaborated in an interview with The Washington Post's Bob Woodward, "If Saddam Hussein had been head of Iraq and there was no oil under those sands, our response to him would not have been as strong as it was in the first Gulf War.

Remember, also, that soon after the invasion, Donald Rumsfeld's deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, told the press that war was our only strategic choice. "We had virtually no economic options with Iraq," he explained, "because the country floats on a sea of oil."

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