Where's the money?

The Asia Times wants to know.

In the 1980s Saddam himself was a great ally of civilization as he was needed to keep revolutionary Iran bogged down in an incredibly messy, bloody, costly war. When Saddam gassed the Kurds, the Pentagon dismissed it as "Iranian propaganda". It was only when Saddam went after Kuwait's oil - and Kuwait had historically been a province of Iraq anyway - that he became evil. In another dynastic family saga, the obsession to get rid of evil passed from Bush father to Bush son. But most of all, former American agent Saddam committed an unforgivable sin: he decided to sell Iraqi oil not in dollars, but in euros.

So amid all the jubilation emanating from the White House and the Pentagon - after all, they finally shot the missing scene from the screenplay - this is the message to tyrants the world over, from the military junta in Myanmar to Uzbekistan's Islam Karimov. The elder Alyev understood it very well - so he will officially go down in history as "a great statesman" and "an ally of the West". You may be neo-Maoist or post-Soviet, you may exterminate vast swathes of your own population, you may be democratically sitting to the right side of Genghis Khan. But if you have oil, you'd better not even think of selling it in euros, or crossing in any way the will of the "Masters of the Universe".

And the question still remains: "So who pocketed the $25 million?"

The almighty dollar may well at the end of its reign. Whoever pocketed it might want to think about exchanging it for euros.

....but hey, do what you want....you will anyway.