For months now, Sunni militants from the Islamic State (better known as ISIS ) have been seizing control of large swathes of Iraq. ISIS is now threatening a major oil-producing region of Iraq But it wasn’t until they encroached into semi-autonomous Kurdish territory and near the Kurdish capital of Erbil — an oil boomtown full of Western companies like Chevron and ExxonMobil — that the Obama administration decided to authorize airstrikes against ISIS. That rather felicitous timing has already led a few commentators to suggest that the current US intervention is all about oil. That’s probably overstating things — the US intervention seems to have a variety of goals here , like protecting the Kurds more generally and preventing ISIS from massacring Iraq’s Yazidis. But it’d also be wrong to pretend that oil is totally irrelevant to the larger crisis in Iraq. Iraq is currently the world’s seventh-largest oil […]