Brent fell from the highest price in nine months amid speculation that violence in Iraq won’t spread to the main oil-producing areas in the nation’s south. West Texas Intermediate was steady in New York . Futures dropped as much as 0.4 percent in London . Islamist militants fought with the army in a town near Baghdad and with Kurds in the oil-rich northern province of Kirkuk, as the U.S. weighed options to stem an offensive that threatens to fracture OPEC’s second-biggest producer. U.S. crude inventories probably slid by 750,000 barrels last week, a Bloomberg News survey shows before an Energy Information Administration report today. “Until we see something happen in the south of Iraq, I suspect we’ve seen the top of any significant price surge for Brent,” David Lennox , a resource analyst at Fat Prophets in Sydney, said by phone today. “It’s really become a sectarian conflict and […]