Dangerous Liaisons.

The article focuses on the international politics associated with petroleum. ExxonMobil Chemical Co. controls concessions covering 12 million acres off the coast of Angola that hold an estimated 7.5 billion barrels of crude. ExxonMobil handed hundreds of millions of dollars to the corrupt regime of President Jose Eduardo dos Santos in the late 1990s, helping to prolong Angola's ruinous civil war--but then the oil business is rarely pretty. Chadian President Idriss Deby bought arms despite an ingenious structure that the World Bank set up to guarantee that oil-related revenue would be spent on social needs instead of on weapons and the military. Under that program, the $2 billion in taxes and royalties the project in Chad is expected to throw off over the next 30 years goes into bank accounts monitored by a nine-member panel, chosen by the government, churches and labor unions, that has a mandate to spend at least 80 percent on social programs and infrastructure.