"Are you aware that... it is illegal for one country to invade another over its natural resources?"

[laststeamtrain]

NAOMI KLEIN: Well, I’m just wondering if it troubles Mr. Greenspan at all that wars over resources in other countries are actually illegal. Mr. Greenspan has praised the rule of law, the importance of the rule of law, in his book. But in his statements about the reasons why this has not been publicly discussed, he has said that it’s not politically expedient at this moment. But it’s not just that it’s not politically expedient, Mr. Greenspan. Are you aware that, according to the Hague Regulations and the Geneva Conventions, it is illegal for one country to invade another over its natural resources?

<more>

http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=07/09/24/1412226

[valerief]

1. Geneva Conventions. Didn't Bush wipe his butt with that before he used the Constitution? nt

[aquart]

3. The constitution was a differnt bowel movement.

[MADem]

2. Well, gee, that's why they trotted out the WMD excuse, ya see! nt

[Xipe Totec]

4. It's also illegal to invade just to exact regime change

Whether Iraq is better off without Saddam is irrelevant, immaterial, and arguable at best.

But once it was determined that THERE WERE NO WMDs IN IRAQ, we lost all moral justification for being there.

At that point, we should have said:

"Oops! Sorry! We thought you had WMDs. We'll leave now; here's your country back. Send us a bill for the breakage"

[mmonk]

5. Yes but we follow no laws now.

We have an empire project and the most ignorant people in the western world, our citizens, are being pulled along into it.

[Blue_Tires]

6. ttt

[superkia]

7. Thats why Dennis Kucinich said it was for oil and voted against it.

Kucinich looked at the evidence and saw something completely different from the rest or the rest had oil and money on their minds when they made their votes?

[KoKo]

8. K&R

[DLnyc]

9. The interview is a very good read

Poor Allen seems to get a little flustered at points:

(snip)

NAOMI KLEIN: Well, you mentioned Latin America, and, of course, there is a rise in leftwing political parties and movements in Latin America. But this is after decades of adherence to IMF structural adjustment policies, and it’s precisely because those policies failed to lift people out of poverty in countries like Bolivia that you have this rise of what you’re calling economic populism. It’s because trickle-down economics was seen to have failed. But you also mentioned economic populism in Latin America in your book, and you blame it for inflation episodes and the collapse of regimes and the toppling of governments, and one of your examples was Chile in the 1970s. Was Chile -- was Salvador Allende’s regime toppled because of inflation, or didn’t the CIA have something to do with that?

ALAN GREENSPAN: Well, look, let’s -- I’m using Latin America as an example. The key question is not Latin America. Let's get back to the United States. Let's get back to the world at large and face the issue of populism here. Remember, the populist issue in Latin America goes back to the roots of Spanish and Portuguese colonization.

NAOMI KLEIN: I’m aware of that, Mr. Greenspan, but there are many developmentalist policies that were trying to address those colonial disparities. They were called it import substitutions. And those leaders were systematically eliminated in a series of coups.

ALAN GREENSPAN: Well, let me ask you a question, which -- you are just taking the capitalist system, to state it very bluntly, and say it’s deficient here, it’s deficient there, it’s deficient every other place. The capitalist system has created more economic wealth in the last seven or eight years around the world. And as I said before, it’s had huge effects in the developing world. Hundreds of millions of people have come out of poverty. And as a consequence of this, not on the basis of populist policies, but on the basis of policies which relate to markets, it strikes me that -- you know, you can say all of the problems that exist in market economies -- and in my book, you will find, I am very much aware of all of them in great detail.

(snip)