Jan 03, 2006 12:03 PM

Running on Fumes

As a measure of the Iraq war's success, it's hard to do much better than oil exports. Whether or not we fought this war for the crudest of reasons, stable oil production is clearly Iraq and its American occupiers' top priority. So if oil exports have gone south, it seems appropriate to assume the worst for the rest of our Mess-O-Potamia.

It then comes as troubling news, indeed, that Iraq oil exports have dipped to little more than a million barrels a day, down a full 700,000 daily barrels since early last year, and less than half of peak production under Saddam.

But wait. It gets worse. Who has risen, phoenix-like, again, to take over Iraq's troubled oil ministry? Ahmed Chalabi, who rose to his new post after what Reuters characterized as an "old-style ministerial coup." Not bad for a deeply unpopular huckster who was shut out of a seat in the Iraqi parliament by failing to garner even 40,000 votes.

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