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Occupying Iraq has hardly helped oil prices stay low. Last
week, oil prices reached a record high of over $102 a barrel.
On March 19, 2003 — the day the Iraq war commenced —
oil was trading at $36 a barrel. A look at the rise in oil
prices:
None of this should have come as a surprise to the Bush administration;
before the war, economists were widely predicting a prolonged
presence in Iraq would lead to a rise in oil prices. As Nobel
laureate Joseph Stiglitz recently noted in Vanity Fair, “The
soaring price of oil is clearly related to the Iraq war. The
issue is not whether to blame the war for this but simply
how much to blame it.”
Rove is also out of step with the American people, a majority
of whom believes that the Iraq war is tied to the current
economic downturn. A recent AP poll found that 68 percent
of Americans say that redeploying from Iraq would help the
economy.
Transcript:
WALLACE: All right. But Obama has found a clever way to link
the war in Iraq to our domestic problems with the economy
here at home. Let’s watch.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
OBAMA: We are spending $12 billion per month. That is money
that we could be spending here in the United States, rebuilding
our infrastructure, building schools, sending kids to university.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
WALLACE: If he’s able to define Iraq in terms of where
do you spend that $12 billion, on the battlefield over there
or on infrastructure and social programs here, doesn’t
Obama win?
ROVE: Well, Obama — it’s a good argument for
Obama, but I’m wondering where it goes, because it really
is a very neo-isolationist argument. It basically says, you
know, We should not be involved in the world because of the
consequences to the budget here at home.
Well, we were not involved in the world before 9/11, and
look what happened. Look at the cost to the American economy
after a terrorist attack on the homeland. We lost a million
jobs in 90 days after 9/11.
If we were to give up Iraq with the third largest oil reserves
in the world to the control of an Al Qaida regime or to the
control of Iran, don’t you think $200 a barrel oil would
have a cost to the American economy?
So you know, it’s a cute thing in a primary. I’m
not certain over an 8-month general election that you can
make the argument that we ought to take a look at every foreign
policy commitment in the United States and measure it on the
basis of the number of dollars that we’ve got there.
I happened to be in Los Angeles on Monday, and somebody had
heard Obama say this to me, and they were Democrat, and at
dinner they said,
I’m worried about that, because does that mean he’s
going to be looking at our support, for example, for the state
of Israel and looking at it in terms of what could we be doing
at home with those dollars?
And it was a nice line, but I’m not certain how durable
a line it necessarily is.
