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Good idea to bomb it I brought this up months ago and got pooh-poohed - "Ah President Bush...can you tell us where we are with the Iraqi oil programme?". Read all about it here in The New York Times - how $76 Million dollars went down the gurgler on just one vital bridge and oil pipeline crossing (that the Americans bombed). "Halliburton" did someone mention Halliburton? Anybody else think that this whole debacle is stinking worse and worse? And this is just one project. You can be sure there are more black holes.

"When Robert Sanders was sent by the Army to inspect the construction work an American company was doing on the banks of the Tigris River, at Al Fatah, 130 miles north of Baghdad, he expected to see workers drilling holes beneath the riverbed to restore a crucial set of large oil pipelines, which had been bombed during the invasion of Iraq.What he found instead that day in July 2004 looked like some gargantuan heart-bypass operation gone nightmarishly bad. A crew had bulldozed a 300-foot-long trench along a giant drill bit in their desperate attempt to yank it loose from the riverbed. A supervisor later told him that the project's crews knew that drilling the holes was not possible, but that they had been instructed by the company in charge of the project to continue anyway. After the project had burned up all of the $75.7 million allocated to it, the work came to a halt.

But as of last week, an official at Iraq's State-owned North Oil Company said, oil was still not flowing at Al Fatah."

Nice bit of "Can do" from our American buddies. When is enough going to be enough? Where are the checks and balances? Where does the buck stop? (And I think we all know the answer to that one)