Important safety tip from Egon

It's important to remember that, amongst the morass of real reasons behind the invasion of Iraq that cannot be admitted to publicly, a very significant one was our government's need to discipline/terminate a once-prized (if necessarily covert) civil servant who had gone resolutely and irredeemably off the reservation.

Which is to say, we hired Mr. Hussein to run the Iraqi oil fields for us, we paid him handsomely to do it, and we were fine with his job performance as long as he wasn't fucking around with Big Energy's bottom line.

Once he got a swelled head and decided he could pump as much or as little crude as he liked in any given month, regardless of what he was told by those he reported to, he had to go. And it is an unfortunate necessity of international trade that, when a concern like the U.S. government has to fire a civil servant at Saddam Hussein's pay grade, it may require military action to enforce the terms of the pink slip.

Equally unfortunately, replacing someone at that pay grade can require a lengthy interview process, and holding the position open for the required period is also something that may necessitate the application of tactical and even strategic military pressure.

There are just the realities of recruitment on this sort of scale, and those who are unwilling to accept this will never really grasp the essence of actual international geopolitics.