Former Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan is out doing interviews, promoting his new memoir, but inexplicably, he hasn't contacted me. It's probably just as well. Though I am painfully polite with most senior citizens (or alte cockers, to use the vernacular) I would find it difficult to maintain a dispassionate stance while holding down the bilious feelings one usually reserves for duplicitous, opportunistic hypocrites.

I've read and reviewed a couple of Greenspan biographies, including Bob Woodward's Maestro, so my opinion is a relatively informed one, though you are entitled to disagree. But I just scored a copy of The Age of Turbulence, his new autobiography, and will wade through it and report my findings in this space. But meanwhile, the old guy still makes news.

The latest blip came as a result of writing, "I am saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil," which was quoted widely in the international press.

Well, of course. If there was oil in Somalia, we would have rushed into there a long time ago. Ditto with Darfur. It was never about freeing the Iraqi people or "restoring" democracy (how's that goin'?) but about securing oil supplies, and attempting to impose commercial solutions on a region wracked by religious and ethnic divisions.

Greenspan subsequently tried to say that the second Bush/Cheney war with Iraq was inevitable because Saddam had threatened the entire region back in 1991 during the first Gulf War, and could take over the Straits of Hormuz through which much of the world's oil supply flows.

Uh, no.

As it's been pointed out, "Bordered by Iran, Oman's Musandam Peninsula and the United Arab Emirates, this stretch of water is of obvious military significance, and subsequently, the U.S. Navy and others parole its waters. So Iraq has no port or border on the Strait. Saddam had no naval capability of consequence after the first Gulf War. He had no air force. On the ground, he would have had to fight his way through a legion of enemies to approach the Strait from either side, and plainly would have been crushed. The U.S. Navy is invincible in those waters."

In other words, Greenspan is full of crap.

Tomorrow: More shots at Greenspan.
                                                                                                                                                          Richard Pachte/MOLI