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Remember how Iraq was never about oil? Two months ago, this little tid-bit didn't receive too much attention:

The Hunt Oil Company of Dallas has become the first international company to receive permission to drill for oil in the Kurdistan region of Northern Iraq since the local government issued an oil-and-gas law last month.

Under its contract with the Kurdistan regional government, Hunt, a closely held company, will join the Impulse Energy Corporation to survey for oil in the Dihok district this year before drilling its first well in 2008. The information was contained in a Hunt Oil statement posted yesterday on Ame Info, a business Web site based in Dubai.

And who is Ray Hunt?

Hunt, who is also on the board of Halliburton, has been a key fundraiser for President George W. Bush, who named him to the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board.

Although, Paul Krugman, to his credit, did comment on this story:

What's interesting about this deal is the fact that Mr. Hunt, thanks to his policy position, is presumably as well-informed about the actual state of affairs in Iraq as anyone in the business world can be. By putting his money into a deal with the Kurds, despite Baghdad's disapproval, he's essentially betting that the Iraqi government -- which hasn't met a single one of the major benchmarks Mr. Bush laid out in January -- won’t get its act together. Indeed, he's effectively betting against the survival of Iraq as a nation in any meaningful sense of the term.

The smart money, then, knows that the surge has failed, that the war is lost, and that Iraq is going the way of Yugoslavia. And I suspect that most people in the Bush administration -- maybe even Mr. Bush himself -- know this, too.

Read the entire article to understand the nexus of oil and failed politics in Iraq.

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