Does This Sound Like A Liberated Country Or A Colonized Country?

In a recent report for Harper's Magazine, "The Black Box, Inside Iraq's Oil Machine," Luke Mitchell describes traveling the southern Iraqi oil field of Rumaila with a petroleum engineer working for Foster Wheeler, a Houston engineering firm hired by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers "to oversee much of the oilfield reconstruction," and protected by private guards employed by the British security company Erinys. He describes what's left of the Iraqi oil industry after decades of war, sanctions, civil war, sabotage, and black-market theft -- a run-down industrial plant with a rusting delivery system that, at a technical level, is now largely in the hands of the Army Corps of Engineers, the Department of Energy, the State Department, and private contractors like KBR, the former division of Halliburton...