No War for Oil?
Not a whole lot of fresh news in this Associated Press story from the Washington Times about the nexus between war and oil in Iraq, but parts of it read kind of funny:
"Pentagon planners were spending long hours on a strategy for protecting the oil fields, fearing that Saddam might torch many of the 1,500 wells — as he did to Kuwaiti oil fields in 1991. Although declining to give details, one senior defense official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said planners intend to secure and protect the fields as rapidly as possible.
The options reportedly range from dispatching special forces into the Iraqi fields during the early fighting to using electronic jamming equipment to hinder a coordinated destruction of hundreds of wells. U.S. planners also hope that those who run Iraq's oil industry would balk if ordered to destroy their own wells."
Reminds me somehow of that wicked bit of parody that ran in the Brit mag Private Eye after 9/11, in which a secret memo from the "Gnomes of Zurich" lamented how 9/11 reminded us (I'm paraphrasing from memory--can't find it online anymore) "how quickly and suddenly we can lose what's most precious to us: our money."
