For five years, everyone who has dared to opine that the Iraq war is largely about oil has been dismissed as a liberal nut job, if not a traitor or worse. The truth, said the administration (and talk radio, and the network news, and the cable news) is that the war was about the imminent threat that Saddam Hussein would use weapons of mass destruction to launch an attack on the United States. Then, after that proved to be false, it was in the name of liberating the Iraqis from living under the oppression of a ruthless dictator. Then it was about stopping the terrorists, who later became insurgents. Then it was about ending the sectarian strife. Now it’s about trying to contain the civil war. Here we are, li’l Dutch boy, finger in the dyke.

The story has been changing all along. Some of us (a pretty lonely minority for a while) suspected, from the first bellicose speeches in 2002, that it was about oil, or oil combined with the desire to project a major American military presence into the Middle East for decades to come. But that’s really only a priority because there’s so much oil there, right? For example, Robert Mugabe is a ruthless dictator who has practically broken his country. Inflation in Zimbabwe is over 10,000%, and something like 3 out of every 4 adult males has left the country because there are no jobs there. People push wheelbarrows full of cash to the store to buy cooking oil, when they can find it. But no one’s proposing to launch a war to free the poor Zimbabweans from their vile oppressor. Zimbabwe has very little oil, so we are busy elsewhere. (For details on Zimbabwe, see this article in the Economist.)

So along comes Alan Greenspan, who apparently included one inflammatory sentence in his new book: “I'm saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows—the Iraq war is largely about oil,” and all of a sudden the media is ablaze with speculation. “Was it really? All this is about oil? Couldn’t be. Why are we just hearing about this now? Everyone knows it? We thought it was about freedom!”

Alan Greenspan is a very smart man. His adroit spinning of the interest rate knob did, after all, avert a potential financial disaster after the dot-com bubble. And hey, if you played it right, you cashed out a small fortune in equity when your house tripled in value. (You did cash out, didn’t you?) However, back then it was primarily investors who would have borne the brunt of the disaster. Well, I suppose that means pension funds, many states, your 401(k), and a lot of other parties. But now that everyone’s leveraged to the hilt with home equity loans left over from those heady days, the risk has been spread across the 60-odd percent of us who own homes. We’ll see what a tidy solution it really was to let all that froth foam over from equities to housing. I suspect that, in the end, it will be less than tidy. So does Mr. Greenspan. As the Financial Times reported today,

Mr Greenspan said he would expect “as a minimum, large single-digit” percentage declines in US house prices from peak to trough and added that he would not be surprised if the fall was “in double digits”.

That’s the nationwide average, by the way. By some measures, property values in California and Florida are already down 10% or more from their peaks and probably have more to go. For the nationwide average to fall by 10%, the coasts are going to fall by a much larger number.

The FT article also said (and this is my favorite part):

As Fed chairman, Mr Greenspan had talked about “froth” in the housing sector, but never said there was a bubble in the market as a whole. His successor Ben Bernanke has also avoided the word “bubble”.

But Mr Greenspan told the FT that froth “was a euphemism for a bubble”.

He said he still thought froth—a collection of bubbles—was a better description, because of the variation in house price appreciation in different local housing markets. But he said “all the froth bubbles add up to an aggregate bubble”.

Now he tells us. All that froth does add up to a bubble. I knew it! And that gets me back to my point: Why are you telling us only now, Mr. Greenspan, that there’s a housing bubble, now that you’re retired and can float around being an insanely well-paid pundit? It’s patently obvious now anyway. We don’t need your penetrating insights to see it now.

And why are you telling us only now that the invasion of Iraq was about oil, now that it’s way too late to do anything about it? Where were you, and all the other people in positions of power, who knew back in 2003 that Bush was making all this shit up? We needed you. 92% of people, or something almost as ridiculous, thought Saddam Hussein had been involved in the 9-11 plot. The Republican house and senate were all in lockstep. The network and cable news outlets, and the Rush Limbaughs and the Fox Newses were all banging their drums and flashing their infographics and animated “War on Terror ’02: Invadistan” logos. And then there were the rest of us, all five of us or so, looking at each other incredulously, asking “What the hell is going on here, and why is no one asking any real questions?” We could have used your penetrating insights back then, Maestro.

Hindsight is always 20/20, as the cliché goes. Fine and good. But what about foresight? Not everyone has it. We can’t fault our past selves for not being omniscient. But sometimes, intelligent people who have the capacity for foresight decide to remain silent, when one might argue that it’s their responsibility to edify the rest of us. Or at least to contribute to the conversation and make a thoughtful point of view more widely understood. We certainly could have used it then.

And I always thought that conservative western interests in the Middle East were about oil and Jesus. Guess I was wrong about Jesus.