Halliburton, Cheney’s baby, winner of all those no-bid contracts in Iraq, is moving its corporate headquarters from Houston to Dubai. Why, when it’s received such largess from the American government? It wants to improve relations with local state-owned oil companies, it says. Oh, and incidentally, they’ll be paying practically no corporate taxes there.

Market types are worried about the signals this sends to investors already worried about US stocks and the dollar (ouch, says the expatriate dollar-earner). But think broader. Why, fundamentally, is the US in Iraq? Certainly commercial concerns, access to oil, etc., play a dominant role. And yet now the most emblematic of those same commercial interests finds it more attractive to site itself elsewhere. Interesting dilemma for an ideologically driven administration, now finding its own economic ideology strangling its national goals. Oops.
Must be some et tu, Dick moments going on in the White House this week.