Crikey

“I am saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil.”

That’s Alan Greenspan, the Grand Poobah of American finance, in his forthcoming memoirs.

It won’t matter. Rupert Murdoch, Paul Wolfowitz and several million anti-war protesters have all made the same connection, and yet any mention of the oil-war nexus still causes sniggers amongst the commentariat.

As Orwell once said, it’s usually not hard to find the truth – but first you have to want to know.

Remember John Howard’s scepticism when the Lancet used standard statistical measures to suggest that 700,000 Iraqis had died because of the invasion? Howard said then: “It’s not plausible, it’s not based on anything other than a house to house survey.”

A smidgin of that methodological scepticism would reveal that General Petraeus’ vaunted Power Point displays about his surge are not quite all that they seem — as McClatchy Newspapers report:

A chart displayed by Army Gen. David Petraeus that purported to show the decline in sectarian violence in Baghdad between December and August made no effort to show that the ethnic character of many of the neighborhoods had changed in that same period from majority Sunni Muslim or mixed to majority Shiite Muslim.

Neither Petraeus nor US Ambassador Ryan Crocker talked about the fact that since the troop surge began the pace by which Iraqis were abandoning their homes in search of safety had increased. They didn’t mention that 86 percent of Iraqis who’ve fled their homes said they’d been targeted because of their sect, according to the International Organization for Migration.

While Petraeus stressed that civilian casualties were down over the last five weeks, he drew no connection between that statement and a chart he displayed that showed that the number of attacks rose during at least one of those weeks.

Petraeus also didn’t highlight the fact that his charts showed that “ethno-sectarian” deaths in August, down from July, were still higher than in June, and he didn’t explain why the greatest drop in such deaths, which peaked in December, occurred between January and February, before the surge began.

And while both officials said that the Iraqi security forces were improving, neither talked about how those forces had been infiltrated by militias, though Petraeus acknowledged that during 2006 some Iraqi security forces had participated in the ethnic violence.

There’s more (and, if your tastes run to wonkishness, click here for a mathematical analysis), but you get the general idea.

As for that Lancet figure, it turns out to be wrong after all. New research puts the real death toll up around 1.2 million.

That’s another statistic that will disappear down the memory hole. As Greenspan says, everyone knows. But who wants to acknowledge the truth about our murderous Iraq intervention when the official fairy tale is so much more pleasant? It’s Harry Potter in Mesopotamia, with General Patronus Charm and Dumbledore’s Army subduing the Iraqi Death Eaters because if we don’t fight Voldemort there we’ll be fighting him here.

Or something. But it’s not about oil. No, not at all.