Quick recommended link: Juan Cole on BP and Iraq

Juan Cole is worth reading for a number of reasons - he's a lefty prof who understands the middle east from serious experience (living there many years, extensive reading of sources in their native languages) and every so often he goes off on the right-wing in wonderful, hard-hitting, factual but passionate rants.

And so when he draws the correlations between Iraq, an oil-based deadly disaster, and the BP oil spew, another oil-based deadly disaster, he does it with style.

Here's one hot paragraph. Read the whole thing.

Both the Iraq tragedy and the BP tragedy are testimonies to greed and hubris. They speak of gigantic endeavors undertaken with insufficient forethought and too few resources. They are enterprises that made a handful of ruthless men wealthy, and impoverished everyone else. In the cutting of corners for short term petty profit, in the extractive determination, in the disregard for any rule of law or prudent regulations, these two projects were both stamped with the personality of Dick Cheney (who met with energy corporations and worked tirelessly to remove them from regulatory oversight, so that he is at the matrix of both disasters).