Chaos....

A glance at today's New York Times (full story here) paints a bleak picture of Iraq. Banks plundered, industry shut down, oil fields idle, government leaderless:

... Money continues to spill from Iraq's broken banking system, although the amounts are smaller now than they were in the first days after President Saddam Hussein's son Uday reportedly arrived at the bank to load sacks of cash into waiting cars. Since then, armed gangs have been slowly working their way through the strongboxes and vaults. Many people have died in the chaos.

The rest of the country's formerly government-run economy is faring little better. Almost all of Iraq's thinly spread industry is at a standstill, its offices charred shells, its computers cannibalized or carried off by looters, its paperwork blowing down countless streets.

The oil fields that provided almost all of the government's revenue and accounted for most of the country's economic output are not operating, largely because the people who ran them have disappeared. Agriculture is about the only part of the economy untouched, although dates and tomatoes do not provide much beyond subsistence.

American military officials, hoping to jump-start the economy by restoring basic services like electricity and water, complain that the country's leaderless bureaucrats are paralyzed, waiting for commands that no one is giving...

What a mess.