Admission of Error

When the Iraqi museum was looted as the US stood by, this was taken as evidence by us anti-war types that the Bushies cared only about Iraq's oil.

Well, we were wrong. Apparently they couldn't bother to protect that either:

At the Exploration Studies and Research Center in Baghdad....[s]ome of the most valuable intellectual property in the country, key to reviving the oil industry, is missing or destroyed. Millions of dollars’ worth of equipment and materials were either stolen or ripped apart. Scores of "rock cores"—four-foot-long cylinders that held the keys to geological data in oil-rich zones—were smashed when looters threw them one by one on the ground and took off with the wood frames that held them. "It was a national loss," says Natic al Bayati, an oil-exploration expert. Seismic maps and original documents, some dating back to 1967, were burned. Seismic data collected on more than 200,000 kilometers of land—at an estimated cost of about $15,000 per kilometer—went up in smoke. "Our people [of Iraq], now they are destroying themselves," says al Bayati.

Two weeks ago Iraq’s State Oil Marketing Organization (SOMO) sold off some 8 million barrels that had been stored in Ceyhan, Turkey, since before the war. Last week an additional 8 million barrels were sold to four international companies: Shell, ChevronTexaco, BP and Taurus, a Swiss-American trading company. It was the first newly produced petroleum sold since the fighting, and it brought in about $200 million. "Peanuts," says Mussab al-Dujayli, a SOMO oil expert. He thinks the U.S. administration is dreaming if it believes it will be able to finance the reconstruction with oil money alone.

"The oil industry is in a state of chaos and anarchy," says al-Dujayli. He points out that the Oil Industry Guards, a military unit that was tasked to secure the pipelines, has been either destroyed or dismantled. The Americans are talking about replacing the force but, meanwhile, pipelines north and south have been attacked several times in just the past two weeks. Iraq is actually importing gasoline from Kuwait, Jordan, Turkey and elsewhere, according to industry sources.

Is there anything King Midas-in-Reverse can't f*** up?