There’s a revealing tidbit in a “Sporting Scene” article in the current New Yorker that sheds some light on today’s front page Washington Post story about how the Bush administration wants American troops to start killing Iranians in Iraq, or, as the story’s author Dafna Linzer puts it:

Though U.S. forces are not known to have used lethal force against any Iranian to date, Bush administration officials have been urging top military commanders to exercise the authority.

In Ben McGrath’s New Yorker piece on the imminent retirement from football of New York Giants running back Tiki Barber (not available online), Barber describes his meeting last spring with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice in Washington, where he attended the White House Correspondents’ Dinner along with a journalist friend. Condi found out he was coming, and invited him to the State Department for lunch. Barber told McGrath:

“She’s welcoming and warm. There’s no façade. I asked her if she wanted to be N.F.L. commissioner. ‘Oh, I’d love to, but I got to figure out Iran first.’…She’s a phenomenal, phenomenal lady.”

Evidently, part of “figuring out Iran” is pleading with American troops in Iraq to start shooting Iranians.

But I wonder why Condi doesn’t “figure out” Iraq first. The Iraqi oil sector is “a mess,” according to the Post, and Exxon Mobil’s vast archive of Iraqi seismic data is going to waste. “If Exxon had security on the ground,” says Fadel Gheit, an oil analyst at Oppenheimer & Co. who used to work for Mobil and is quoted in the Post article, “the following day it would have crews there. And money would be no object.” So get cracking, Condi. Less than two years left in this chess game.

There are all sorts of morals one might draw here, pointing out how greed usually gets its comeuppance. How about this one: don’t count your barrels before they’re pumped.

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