News: "Senior Pentagon officials ignored bleak in-house assessments of the state of Iraq's oil industry when they gave optimistic predictions to Congress during the war that oil revenue would quickly get the country back on its feet.
... Addressing Congress in April, the deputy defence secretary, Paul Wolfowitz, insisted that 'we are dealing with a country that can really finance its own reconstruction and relatively soon'. Shortly afterwards, he estimated that Iraq's oil revenues could quickly climb to more than $30bn (�18bn) a year, despite warnings from United Nations and international oil industry specialists who visited Iraq that its oil installations had been damaged by a decade of sanctions and neglect."
- posted by geoff @ #