It's ludicrous. The country's infrastructure is falling apart yet instead of flying in engineers to reconstruct it, they're flying in geologists and oil people to take soundings on the hundreds of unworked oil fields.
Two of my US friends are in Iraq now and one of them told me online about a week ago that a detachment from his unit had to provide protection for a group of geologists who were going out to 'survey' an area near where they're based.