Stockman: If We Want to Bring Oil Prices Down, We Should Stop Beating the War Drums

Stockman: War Drums Are Driving Up Oil Prices and Hurting the Economy

While Nouriel Roubini says that attacking Iran would lead to global recession (and see this), Ronald Reagan’s budget director – David Stockman – points out that even beating the drums of war is driving up oil prices and hurting our economy:

I think you can address this decisively by stop beating the war drums right now. And Obama could do that, and he could say the neocons are history.
The policy that they’re talking about right now is the same thing we heard in 2001, 2002, and 2003. And he needs to clearly say that we’re not going to attack Iran. We’re not going to permit Israel to attack Iran. They are not part of the axis of evil. They’re part of the axis of medieval.
In other words, these are backward people that aren’t going to threaten the western world, and we need to get into a serious process of negotiation. If we do that, the price of oil will drop $30 within a few months, and all the speculators who are on the wrong side of the ship would learn a good lesson.
But as long as the war drums continue to beat, as they are now, we’re going to see this kind of speculative fraud. It’s not real. It’s not supply and demand world today.

This is not Stockman’s first anti-war statement. Last year, Stockman – who has proved himself to be a true conservative – said:

We are now at a historical inflection point at which the time has arrived for a classic post-war demobilization of the entire military establishment,” David Stockman said in an exclusive interview.
“The Cold War is long over,” he continued. “The wars of occupation are almost over and were complete failures — Afghanistan and Iraq. The American empire is done. There are no real seriously armed enemies left in the world that can possibly justify an $800 billion national defense and security establishment, including Homeland Security.”
Short of that, he suggested, the United States has “reached the point of no return” with its artificial creation of wealth, and will eventually face a sharp economic decline.
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This is a profound disappointment that there’s not even a debate — a serious debate about dramatic change in our imperialist foreign policy and war-making establishment in this administration — allegedly the most left-wing administration that we’ve had in modern time.”
“I don’t have much hope that what needs to be done will be done until it’s finally forced on us by a world bond market crisis, which will happen sooner or later,” Stockman added.
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That’s why we’re just at the beginning of solving this massive financial collapse we had in 2008 and not in the process of healthy recovery as some of the pals in the White House or on Capitol Hill or on Wall Street would have you believe.”