THE BURNED OVER DISTRICT

This Boston Globe piece on the vulnerability of the Iraqi oil industry is a model of the overall disaster, including huge cost overruns for Halliburton. Needless to say, Iraqi oil is not paying for Li'l Georgies Glorious War.

Three years after Bush administration officials predicted that oil revenues would fund the country's reconstruction, the industry is in turmoil. Attacks that knocked out pipelines in the north have combined with bad weather in the south to drive Iraq's oil exports last month to their lowest level since September 2003, in the aftermath of the US-led invasion.

The oil industry, which accounts for about 60 percent of Iraq's gross national product and more than 90 percent of government revenue, has been hit with nearly 300 major attacks since 2003, according to Iraq Pipeline Watch, an arm of the Institute for the Analysis of Global Security, a Washington-based energy think tank. In July, Iraqi government officials estimated that the attacks had cost the fledgling government $11 billion in lost revenue.

In northern Iraq, where pipelines snake like rusty veins from the oil fields of Kirkuk, engineers and insurgents battle daily over pipelines that will determine the future of the country.

''Good guys fix it. Bad guys blow it up. That struggle continues almost every day," said Robert Maguire, a US embassy official in Baghdad who focuses on Iraq's oil sector.

But this has not stopped Halliburton and Big Dick from profiting from the troubles.

First, Kellogg Brown & Root, a subsidiary of Halliburton Co., and two subcontractors were hired to dig a hole under the riverbed for the pipes, despite concerns that the gravel-like quality of the soil would make such work nearly impossible, according to a Washington-based US official and Randy Duncan, project manager for A&L Underground, the Kansas-based company eventually brought in to finish the job.

Indeed, it became an engineering nightmare that ran so over budget that the special inspector general for Iraq reconstruction conducted an assessment that will be released later this month. A Kellogg Brown & Root spokesman said the soil problems could not have been anticipated and that the rising price of security increased the project cost.

Originally budgeted at $76 million, the US government ultimately paid Kellogg Brown & Root $88 million, but canceled the contract before it had been completed.

Such a pity, they couldn't finish the job. At least they got paid.