The sweet perfume wafting over northern Iraq does not come from the wildflowers that speckle its rumpled plains in spring. It is the smell of oil and it is everywhere, flaring at wellheads, sloshing from the tanker trucks that grind up potholed roads to backyard refineries in the Kurdish hills and fuming from their chimneys. Nor is this the oiliest part of Iraq. That lies in the deserts to the south where it literally seeps from the ground. In fact the whole of Iraq sits atop seams and pockets of the sticky stuff. There is plenty to go around, if only the Iraqis could agree to stop shooting each other.
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