ConservativeINC

Alan Greenspan, the former Federal Reserve chairman, said in an interview that the removal of Saddam Hussein had been “essential” to secure world oil supplies, a point he emphasized to the White House in private conversations before the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

Greenspan, who was the country’s top voice on monetary policy at the time Bush decided to go to war in Iraq, has refrained from extensive public comment on it until now, but he made the striking comment in a new memoir out today that “the Iraq War is largely about oil.” In the interview, he clarified that sentence in his 531-page book, saying that while securing global oil supplies was “not the administration’s motive,” he had presented the White House with the case for why removing Hussein was important for the global economy.

“I was not saying that that’s the administration’s motive,” Greenspan said in an interview Saturday, “I’m just saying that if somebody asked me, ‘Are we fortunate in taking out Saddam?’ I would say it was essential.”

He said that in his discussions with President Bush and Vice President Cheney, “I have never heard them basically say, ‘We’ve got to protect the oil supplies of the world,’ but that would have been my motive.” Greenspan said that he made his economic argument to White House officials and that one lower-level official, whom he declined to identify, told him, “Well, unfortunately, we can’t talk about oil.” Asked if he had made his point to Cheney specifically, Greenspan said yes, then added, “I talked to everybody about that.”

Greenspan said he had backed Hussein’s ouster, either through war or covert action. “I wasn’t arguing for war per se,” he said. But “to take [Hussein] out, in my judgment, it was something important for the West to do and essential, but I never saw Plan B” — an alternative to war.

That’s what he was talking about in his book The Age of Turbulence: Adventures in a New World. Look, I think that everyone knows that if Saddam was not sitting on a bunch of oil he would not have ever been an important figure. Neither would anyone in Iran, Saudi Arabia, or any other Arab state. Their countries would still be backwaters, OK, the whole of their countries would still be backwaters.

It is a fact of the world that those who have money have power. This goes doubly for countries. Unless a poor country has nukes (ahem, North Korea) it doesn’t even come on our radar. We could really care less. If you feel icky about this or think its wrong to care more geopolitically about countries that could strangle Western economies then you should grow up.

Basically everything I’ve read about Greenspan’s book makes sense to me. Bush has spent like a drunken sailor with the aid of willing Republicans in congress and the senate. It’s too bad but it’s the truth. Our president does deserve ridicule for this.

Greenspan also praises Bill Clinton as a fighter for a balanced budget. I would have to respectably disagree with the Chairman on this one however. Bill Clinton was prevented from enacting a health care plan that would have dwarfed the current proposal by his wife (the former one was also headed up by his wife by the way). It was republicans in congress that prevented him from spending because it was the en vogue thing to do as a republican.

Maybe this is the appropriate time to wax poetic about the Bush presidency. Greenspan just did in his book, why not me now? Well, if I had to I do not think Bush will go down in the annals of American history as a great president. It pains me to write this because all the way up to 2005 and maybe a little into 2006 I would have argued otherwise.

President Bush should be commended for realizing there is a gigantic problem with Islamofascism and given credit for trying to do something about it. But I don’t think it’s enough. We have left a very destabilizing player in the region free to do whatever mischief they want. And this player, Iran, knows it can get away with everything because it has an ever increasing group of “peace activists” in the West who will do whatever they can to stop the president from doing what is necessary.

Oh well, Bush has done better than Gore would have ever hoped. Imagine not fighting a War on Terror but a war on your SUV right now. That’s what would be happening and I’m sure the left would be all for that war already having set fire to dozens of Hummers in the past few years. BigT

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Machiavelli has been derided in popular culture as the guy who advocates lying, cheating, stealing and every other vice to get what you want. He is seen as a proponent of monarchy and his writings are seen by those who mostly have never read them as being the blueprint for underhandedness. I am here to say that that all is false.

Some things are true no matter how much you want to believe them or not. Machiavelli knew this and wrote about it. He also said that the best form of government is a republic, for example. That you should never use mercenaries if you wanted to win a war. Lying to the public is sometimes necessary and if the ruling government is seen as immoral then the country is assuredly lost.

His ideal government was Rome not because it was corrupt or good at ruling people. It was the best government because it lasted longer than any other and did so, mostly, without losing the morality of its citizenry.

Reading his books is sobering because there is mounds of support he uses to make his points. After reading The Prince and The Discourses (I have yet read The Art of War) I find myself in a better position to understand why governments do what they do or, at least, what they should be doing.

The most striking piece of wisdom I got out of the two books I read was this:

For Principality easily becomes Tyranny. From Aristocracy the transition to Oligarchy is an easy one. Democracy is without difficulty converted into Anarchy. So that if anyone who is organizing a commonwealth sets up one of the three first forms of government, he sets up what will last but for a while, since there are no means whereby to prevent it passing into its contrary, on account of the likeness which in such a case virtue has to vice.

From The Discourses

Another, more harsh and maybe more cynical view can be found here:

…when cities or provinces have been accustomed to live under a prince and his line becomes extinct, being on the one hand used to obeying and on the other deprived of their leader, they cannot agree among themselves in the selection of a new one and do not know how to live in freedom. Hence they are slower to take up arms, and a prince may more easily win them and hold them. But in republics there is greater vigor, greater hatred, greater desire for revenge, and the memory of earlier freedom cannot and will not let them rest. Thus, the surest procedure is either to destroy them or to live in them.

From The Prince

The Prince is by no means idealistic, to say the least. But it does give clues about how to deal with a world that is still governed by laws that were well known in Machiavelli’s time, i.e. countries in the Middle East.

Both of these books are definitely worth the price of admission because they at the most basic level change your way of thinking more towards the country level than towards the individual level of politics. And, if these two books are any indication that means The Art of War is also worth the price, if not, I will tell you after I have read it.

The much maligned Machiavelli is definitely overshadowed by contemporaries like Da Vinci but his works are still as much on the mark today as they were when they were written. BigT

Over the last few years there has been a push, especially in the business world, to trust the brilliance of crowds to make major financial decisions. This can be seen in many different applications from finding new places to mine for minerals to finding lost people using Google maps. Called crowdsourcing, this phenomenon is explored most thoroughly in the intriguing book Wikinomics. It is truly a great idea, 100,000,000 heads are better than one but the world still needs the Big Kahuna.

Crowds are, after all, just crowds. They definitely have much more combined intelligence than leaders do but without the direction offered by leaders they can be extremely destructive. Maybe worse, though, is a leader who leverages the power of crowds to do evil (Hitler anyone?).

Our increasing technological abilities makes it possible to expand a crowd’s base and by extension its power and reach. That is why, now more than ever, we need moral leaders.

Take for example NowPublic, a site where many people post news stories (like me) and a place where many get their news. This site has exponentially increased the power of individuals to break news and make news. What this site has done so exceptionally well is that it enables individuals to have more power based on their merit to help decide what news is good and bad.

Hopefully NowPublic will remain a bastion of democratic meritocracy and not turn into something like your local PTA where all the parents sit around discussing how best to spend the schools money on trips for the PTA members themselves.

Quite possibly the greatest example of an undirected mob would be the government. You have these bureaucracies with all this kinetic knowledge doing hardly anything right. They are mired in paperwork, politics, ineffective policies and so much more. And the problem has no chance of being fixed in this situation because there is no real way of getting leaders at the helm to turn these rusting Titanics around.

Perhaps the best example of a leader directing a crowd in the right way would be Ken Mehlman’s steerage of President Bush’s reelection. In Michael Barone’s 2004 article about the election he had this to say:

Mehlman was the structural engineer who turned the plans into reality. Mehlman’s great achievement was to create a largely volunteer organization of 1.4 million people who turned out the vote in counties big and small for Bush. He managed this task the way Rudolph Giuliani managed the New York City Police Department: by requiring metrics–numerical goals, validated by independent parties–to measure the work being done every week. This enabled the Bush organization to plug holes and to provide psychic rewards for those doing good work. No one (including Giuliani himself) thought Giuliani could cut crime in half in New York City; very few thought that Mehlman could produce 10 million new votes for Bush. But Giuliani did it, and so did Mehlman.

Great things come from crowds; we find out how well the economy is doing, what the price of every good should be, and who should be elected president are all decided by crowds. But crowds need great leaders because without a leader they don’t do anything, with a bad leader they are ineffective, and with an evil leader they are capable of very horrible things. BigT