Boiling Oil

Reuters and Salon (subscription or ad-viewing required) look more closely at the Iraqi resistance's "new" tactic of disrupting the transport of crude oil from the northern and southern oil fields.

Combined with the abysmal news coming out of "liberated" Iraq, you can't help but get the feeling that the "October Surprise," at least the one Team Bush dreads, could possibly be a complete breakdown of what little civil order is left in the country. I'll link again to the general page for Today in Iraq--check it out. Reporters are being ordered away from Najaf, some of whom were threatened with arrest or even shooting. Four more US soldiers were killed--though Bush and the wrongwingers will manage to spit on the bodybags by calling the casuality level "acceptable." As noted above, the resistance is sabotaging an extremely vulnerable target--the pipelines--which not only cause physical damage that has to be repaired, but also undermines the funding for any sort of government that might try to impose a degree of order.

Juan Cole notes that the national congress in Iraq was disrupted repeatedly by mortar fire, comparing and contrasting John Burns and Rajiv Chandrasekaran's versions of the story (finding Burns's to be more believable--it's also the more pessimistic). Any sort of "victory" in Najaf will by necessity be tempered--because victory comes at the price of pissing off millions of religious Iraqis, not to mention Sh'ias throughout the world. Any way you look at it, Iraq is one hell of a mess--brought to you by the people in the Bush administration.

You'd think the media would be all over this--but they've learned their priorities. Why look into serious breaches of public trust when you can, say, deliver a hardhitting profile of Jessica Cutler, aka Washingtonienne? Nothing like a little bit of titillation to take one's mind off tragedy...