"I'm sorry for the status of our oil industry," said Sabah Jumah, a former Oil Ministry official. "It was the best in the Middle East."

That is beyond wishful thinking. It is a fantasy memory.

The Iraqis have been over-pumping and under-maintaining their oil reserves for decades so that Saddam could pay for his disastrous wars, cradle-to-grave social welfare programs, subsidize state-run businesses, maintain a bloated bureaucracy and bribe the thousands of sheiks and mullahs and other tribal leaders. Oh yeah, and build himself and his favorite party members multiple palaces and of course, the odd torture chamber here and there. His oil management consisting of threatening petroleum engineers that cautioned against the rate of extraction. Saddam failed to modernize his distribution system and failed to educate the younger generation in the sciences and engineering, fearing what they would learn in a real university. His production facilities were worse than PEMEX. Saddam's answer was to go invade some other country.