Fear was once again driving the market. Was this the Third Shock, the next stage in the collapse of the Middle East and its oil industry into chaos and militancy? Would Iraq be eliminated from the world oil balance? Would Iran once again disappear as a supplier? Would the battle between Sunni and Shia, between Arab and Persian, destabilize the entire Gulf? Or, perhaps even worse, would Iran, with three times the population of Iraq, prevail and carry its fundamentalist, anti-Western revolution deeper and deeper into the heart of the Middle East? In pondering those questions, one could read the
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