By Staff
It seems so long ago that Iraq was touted as the country that could finance its own reconstruction.
His errant economic acumen nevertheless promoted Wolfowitz to the World Bank presidency.
Yet the 1.6 million barrels per day Iraq exported in July represents half a million less than when Saddam Hussein was in power.
Despite 115 billion barrels of oil reserves under the desert, Iraq must import gasoline. Long lines at service stations have become a part of daily life.
Iraq's battered oil industry, even for an administration teeming with oilmen, never stuck to the story line, any more than the weapons of mass destruction or predictions that we would be hailed as liberators in Baghdad.
So, rosy predictions about Iraqi oil paying for America's conquest of the evil tyrant's regime never panned out except as another page in the marketing manual that spun us into war.
In reality, Iraq's oil industry, saddled by more than a decade of economic sanctions, is in sad shape.
Oil industry inspectors for the United Nations reported as such as long ago as 1998, re-confirming their conclusion in 2000 and again in 2001 for an administration that sees what it wants and dismissed this news as further proof that the UN had been taken in by the Iraqis.
But the U.S. Energy Information Administration belatedly concedes that the UN report "now appears to have been largely accurate."