The voting shows that Mr Maliki and his Dawa party are stronger but the significance can be exaggerated. Although he fought a secular campaign, on important decisions Mr Maliki does not generally act without seeking the opinion of the Shia Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani. The election has also been painted as a setback for Iranian influence but Mr Maliki is still going to keep close relations with Tehran while remaining on good terms with the US. One test of the success of the election will be how far the results are accepted by the losers.

the iraqis dont deserve us:
Now we are at work in Iraq. Those pesky Iraqis don’t deserve our sacrifice, it seems, because their elected leaders are not doing what we want them to do.

what is holding up the delivery of the long-awaited iraqi oil law?:
External influences were for the most part, behind the approval of a draft of the oil law, which will be the first and major step in the privatization of Iraqi oil wealth and will ensure that the oil will be produced and marketed by the IOCs with enormous profit to them.
(...) Neither the US Republican administration nor the Democrats had any disagreement with this policy and made the approval of the oil law a benchmark for future US strategy in Iraq within the Iraqi Study Group report.
(...) The IMF made the approval of the oil law one of the main conditions for reducing the Iraqi international debts, as declared in December 1, 2005 in the Paris meetings between the IMF and representatives of the Iraqi Government.
(...) More and more MPs are calling for the law to be carefully studied before its approval. The Iraqi parliament has gone into summer recess without discussing the oil law, but up until now the only members who are openly standing against the oil law are the MPs from Sadr's Movement and some individual members from the "Iraqi Accord," the Dawa Party and some independent MPs.
(...) The latest Oil poll, which was carried out in June and July 2007 by KA Research, has shown that the Iraqis oppose plans to open the country's oil fields to foreign investment by a factor of two to one (63% oppose to 31% for).
(...) The Bush Administration and their Ambassador in Baghdad had openly threatened to replace Al-Maliki's government with a new government, headed by their man in Iraq -- the old Baathist, Iyad Allawi. Al-Maliki has openly accused Allawi in several speeches of attempting to overthrow his government with the help of some units of the Iraqi army and security generals including the head of the Iraqi security forces, the old Baathist general Mohammed Al-Shahwani. These generals were appointed to their positions during Allawi's appointed government by the last US official administrator Paul Bremer back in May 2004, and are still taking their orders directly from the US embassy in Baghdad.
(...) The US administration recognized that a US-led military coup d'etat would not result in any laws being recognized as legitimate by the international community if parliament were to be dissolved. They therefore moved to a new policy, which involved direct interference with the political process in Iraq through their more reliable allies to reorganize the political alliance on which the government relied in order to achieve their goals. They finally succeeded in achieving the establishment of such a front, which was called the "The front of the moderates" on August 15, between the two main Kurdish parties (KDP and PUK), two of the Shiite parties (the SCIRI and Al-Dawa party -- the Al-Maliki wing is called the "External organization"), with negotiations still ongoing to persuade the Islamic Party/Accord front -- the main Sunni party -- to join this new alliance.
(...) The claim of the US Administration that the oil and gas law will allow all Iraqis to share the oil revenue is no more than another peace of misinformation, as the "Revenue Sharing Law" is a separate federal revenue law which is still being negotiated between the different Iraqi parties representing all sectors of Iraqi society.
(...) The latest oil poll which was carried out in June and July 2007 by KA Research has shown that the vast majority of Iraqis (91%) did not feel informed enough about the oil law. This included the 33% who said they knew a little information on the law, 30% who said that they were not very informed and 28% that stated that they knew nothing about it.

jockeying for power:
The US may have succeeded in toppling the Iraqi regime, but Iran succeeded in placing its allies in positions of power in Baghdad in the post-invasion phase. Iran won its influence in Baghdad not only through its political, sectarian, economic, military and intelligence presence in Iraq, but also through its skill at capitalising on the momentous bungling of the neo-conservative administration in Washington. In 15 years it reversed the outcome of the Iraq-Iran war (1980-1988). From near military defeat it has now scored almost total political victory. It is perhaps no coincidence, therefore, that Al-Maliki's visit was timed to coincide with the anniversary of the Iraq-Iran war.
(...) All three parties appear to be operating on a tacitly agreed-upon premise: a compromise solution will only work if each party does what it takes to ensure that the other parties' worst nightmares do not come true. Riyadh's nightmare is that Iran will succeed in securing a large base of operations in the area of southern Iraq adjacent to the Saudi Arabian borders, within a stone's throw of Saudi oil fields. Tehran fears the emergence of a central government in Baghdad which owes its primary allegiance to Washington and which could eventually build up a strong enough army to threaten Iran again in the future. Washington is cringing at the spectre of a forced withdrawal without face-saving agreements and, therefore, having to sustain the internal and external fallout from an unequivocal defeat while Tehran is left to crow over its political victory in Iraq.

is iraq's government falling apart?:
While many Shia accuse Al-Maliki of incompetence for his failure to end attacks by Sunni factions, especially by Al-Qaeda, Sunni groups blame him for failure to crackdown on Shia extremists, such as the Al-Mahdi militia, which is charged with torture, assassinations and execution-style slayings.

petroleum law [from e-mail from anon. expert on j. cole's blog]:
The reporting in the press-media about the proposed Petroleum Law omits a material fact. The proposed Law does not have a word that relates to the “fair distribution of revenues.” That phrase relates to the dispersion of gasoline stations, not to the distribution of revenues. The gasoline stations will be covered by another petroleum law not yet considered by the Council of Ministers.
(...) But the Constitution treats regions [provincial confederacies] as more important in the federal structure. There are extensive provisions with respect to the permitted regional governing institutions.
(...) The proposed Petroleum Law has provisions which deal with the ownership rights – including rights to award oil field development contracts – granted by the Constitution to “Regional Authorities.” Article 110 of the Constitution expressly gives the power, in the case of the oil industry, to the federal government and “the producing regions and provinces,” but the provinces are not included as such; they are disempowered. The way the Constitution is written permits, even requires, the substitution of the regional governments for the provincial governments.
(...) The power and jurisdiction is established by the reservation article, just as all powers not expressly granted to the US federal government are reserved to the states. But the power is reserved not to the provinces, but to the regions: “Article (111): All that is not written in the exclusive powers of the federal authorities is in the authority of the regions. In other powers shared between the federal government and the regions, the priority will be given to the region's law in case of dispute.”
(...) The federal government is going to pass many laws which, under a federal system, should be enacted by the provinces. The problem the Iraqis have is that the Constitutional default or reserved power system calls for the regions to enact the laws, but, outside of the Kurdistan Regional Government’s territory, there are no regional governments in existence to enact the laws.
(...) Their first and main task after they assure that food and medical assistance is available, is or should be to get the provinces, that is the Regions, started drafting a lot of laws. At the moment, with the exception of the Investment Law, the only laws of Iraq are in decrees of the former regime or orders issued by the Coalition Provisional Authority.
(...) If the Council of Representatives were to reject the proposed Petroleum Law, that would be that, short of another revolution. The agreement struck between Mr. al-Hakim and Adnan al-Dulaimi to postpone the effective date of the Regions Law until mid-2008 means that the matter might not come up again until after the Regions Law becomes effective, and Provincial elections are held after the enactment of an Elections Law. During that time, staffing and intra-government relationships will be firmly entrenching the new regime in Baghdad. The power of the federal government will be absolute. It should be noted that no reference is being made to the third source of law, the Sharia.

cockburn on iraq in 2007 (introduction to paperback version of his book):
At 3 am on January 11, 2007 a fleet of American helicopters made a sudden swoop on the long-established Iranian liaison office in the city of Arbil in northern Iraq. Their mission was to capture two senior Iranian security officials, Mohammed Jafari, the deputy head of the Iranian National Security Council, and General Minojahar Frouzanda, the head of intelligence of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards. What made the American raid so extraordinary is that both men were in Iraq at the official invitation of the Iraqi President Jalal Talabani, who held talks with them at his lakeside headquarters at Dokan in eastern Kurdistan. The Iranians had then asked to see Massoud Barzani, the president of the Kurdistan Regional Government, in the Kurdish capital Arbil. There was nothing covert about the meeting which was featured on Kurdish television.
(...) In the event the U.S. attack failed. It was only able to net five junior Iranian officials at the liaison office that had existed in Arbil for years, issuing travel documents, and which was being upgraded to a consular office by the Iraqi Foreign Ministry in Baghdad.
(...) If Iran had undertaken a similar venture by, for example, trying to kidnap the deputy head of the CIA when he was on an official visit to Pakistan or Afghanistan, then Washington might have considered the attempt a reason for going to war.
(...) The Arbil raid is significant because it was the first visible sign of a string of highly significant American policy decisions announced by President George W. Bush in an address to the nation broadcast in the U.S. a few hours earlier on January 10. There have been so many spurious turning points in the war -- such as the capture of Saddam Hussein in 2003, the handover of sovereignty to an Iraqi government in 2004, or the elections of 2005 -- that truly critical moments are obscured or underrated.
(...) President Bush did the exact opposite of what the Baker-Hamilton report had proposed. He identified Iran and Syria as America's prime enemies in Iraq, stating: "These two regimes are allowing terrorists and insurgents to use their territory to move in and out of Iraq." Instead of reducing the American commitment, Bush pledged to send 20,000 extra troops to Iraq to try to secure Baghdad. In other words, the U.S. was going to respond to its lack of success in the conflict by escalating both the war in Iraq and America's confrontation with Iran in the Middle East as a whole. The invasion of 2003 had destabilized the whole region; now Bush was about to deepen that instability.
(...) "People are saying that Bush's speech means that the occupation is going to go on a long time," the Iraqi political scientist Ghassan Attiyah told me soon after the President had stopped speaking. Although the new U.S. security plan for Baghdad, which began on February 14th, was sold as a temporary "surge" in troop numbers, it was evident that the reinforcements were there to stay.
(...) Training and equipping Iraqi troops to replace American soldiers -- so they could be withdrawn from Iraq -- had been the cornerstone of U.S. military planning since 2005. Now, the policy was being quietly downgraded, though not abandoned altogether.
(...) The U.S. Army was to go on fighting the five-million-strong Sunni community, as it had been doing since the capture of Baghdad. The Sunni demand for a timetable for U.S. withdrawal was not being met. At the same time, the U.S. was going to deal more aggressively with the 17 million Shias in Iraq. It would contest the control over much of Baghdad and southern Iraq of the Mehdi Army, the powerful militia led by the nationalist Shia cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, who is regarded with cult-like devotion by many Shia Iraqis. Not content with this, Washington was also more openly going to confront Iran, the most powerful of Iraq's neighbors.
(...) Iran was easy to demonize in the U.S., just as Saddam Hussein had been blamed four years earlier for everything wrong in Iraq and the Middle East. The New York Times, which had once uncritically repeated White House claims that Saddam possessed weapons of mass destruction, now ran articles on its front page saying that Iran was exporting sophisticated roadside bombs to Iraq that were killing American soldiers. There was no reference to the embarrassing discoveries of workshops making just such bombs in Baghdad and Basra.
(...) The extent of the military failure over the previous three-and-a-half years was extraordinary. The foreign media never quite made clear how little territory the U.S. and the Iraqi army fully controlled -- even in the heart of Baghdad. It was astonishing, in early 2007, to look out from the north-facing windows in the Hamra and see columns of black smoke billowing up from Haifa Street on the other side of the Tigris river. This is a two mile long militant Sunni corridor less than a mile from the northern end of the Green Zone. Since the early days of the fighting, the U.S. Army, supported by Iraqi army troops, had been unsuccessfully trying to drive out the insurgents who ruled it.
(...) American commanders often genuinely believed that they were in command of towns and cities which Iraqis, including the local police, told me were dominated by Sunni insurgents or Shia militia. On one occasion in early 2007, senior U.S. and Iraqi officers were giving a video press conference from Diyala, a much fought over province northeast of Baghdad, confidently claiming that they were winning the fight against the Sunni rebels. Even as they were speaking an insurgent squad attacked and captured the mayor's office in Baquba, the capital of Diyala.
(...) The addition, promised by Bush, of five extra brigades to the U.S. forces in Baghdad made, at least at first, some difference to security in the capital. The number of bodies of people tortured, shot in the head, and dumped in the street, went down from the horrific levels of late 2006. These death-squad killings were mostly of Sunni and were the work of the Mehdi Army or of army and police units collaborating with them.
(...) A few days before the security plan began, Muqtada al-Sadr stood down his militiamen, telling them to dump their arms and move out of Baghdad. He was intent on avoiding direct military confrontation with the U.S. reinforcements. But while the Shia were killing fewer Sunni, the Sunni insurgents were still slaughtering Shia civilians with massive suicide bombs, often vehicle-borne, targeting crowded market places. These did not stop and improved security measures made little difference.
(...) There was a central lesson of four years of war which Bush and Tony Blair never seemed to take on board, though it was obvious to anybody living in Iraq: the occupation was unpopular and becoming more so by the day. Anti-American guerrillas and militiamen always had enough water to swim in. The only community in Iraq that fully supported the U.S. presence was the Kurds -- and Kurdistan was not occupied.
(...) Opinion polls consistently show this trend. A comprehensive Iraqi survey has been conducted by ABC News, USAToday, the BBC, and ARD annually over the last three years. Its findings illuminate the most important trends in Iraqi politics. They show that, by March 2007, no less than 78% of Iraqis opposed the presence of U.S. forces, compared to 65% in November 2005 and 51% in February 2004. In the latter year, only 17% of the population thought that violence against U.S. forces was acceptable, while by 2007 the figure had risen to 51%. This pool of people sympathetic to Sunni insurgents and Shia militias was so large as to make it difficult to control and impossible to eliminate them.
(...) Some American soldiers see that the problem is not about a few infiltrators. "Any Iraqi officer who hasn't been assassinated or targeted for assassination is giving information or support to the insurgents," one US marine was quoted as saying. "Any Iraqi officer who isn't in bed with the insurgents is already dead."
(...) A prime reason why the U.S. supported Saddam Hussein during his war with Iran in 1980-88 is that it did not want a Shia clerical regime, possibly sympathetic to America's enemies in Tehran, to come to power in Iraq. It was the same motive that stopped President Bush senior pushing on to Baghdad and overthrowing Saddam after defeating the Iraqi army in Kuwait in 1991. After 2003, Washington was in the same quandary: If elections were held, the Shia, comprising 60% of the population that had been long excluded from power, were bound to win.
(...) At first, the U.S. tried to postpone elections, claiming that a census had to be held. It was only on the insistence of the Shia Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani that two elections were held in 2005, in which the Shia religious parties triumphed. Washington has never been comfortable with these Shia-Kurdish governments. It demanded that they try to reconcile with the Sunni -- though exactly how Shia and Kurdish leaders are supposed to do this, given that the main Sunni demand is a timetable for an American withdrawal, has never been clear.
(...) For their part, the Shia, have become increasingly suspicious that the U.S. and Britain do not intend to relinquish real control over security to the elected Iraqi government. There were many examples of this. For instance, in the Middle East the most important force underpinning every government is the intelligence service. In theory (as I explain in my book, The Occupation: War and Resistance in Iraq), the Iraqi government should get its information from the Iraqi National Intelligence Service (INIS) that was established in 2004 by the US-run Coalition Provisional Authority. But a peculiarity of the INIS is that its budget is not provided by the Iraqi Finance Ministry but by the CIA.
(...) Over the next three years, they paid $3 billion to fund its activities. During this time it was run by General Mohammed Shahwani, who had been the central figure in a CIA-run coup in 1996 against Saddam Hussein that had failed disastrously. For long periods he was even banned from attending Iraqi cabinet meetings. A former Iraqi cabinet minister, who was a member of the country's National Security Council, complained to me that "we only get information that the CIA wants us to hear." Iraqis did not fail to spot the extent to which the power of their elected government was being trimmed. The poll cited above showed that by Spring 2007 only 34% of Iraqis thought their country was being run by their own government; 59% believed the U.S. was in control. The Iraqi government had been robbed of legitimacy in the eyes of its own people.
(...) In the course of 2006 and 2007, Baghdad disintegrated into a dozen hostile cities at war with each other. There were fewer and fewer mixed Sunni and Shia neighborhoods. Terror engulfed the city like a poisonous cloud. There was a lot to be frightened of: Sunni insurgent groups; the Shia militias, Mehdi Army, and the Badr Organization; police and police commandos; the Iraqi army and the Americans.
(...) I was in contact with a Sunni family called al-Mashadani who lived in the west Baghdad district of Hurriya. It was under attack by Shia militiamen. Khalid, the father, worked as mechanic in the railway station. He was forced to leave his job when the repair yard was taken over by Shia militiamen. He stayed away and asked a Shia fellow worker to pick up his salary. This worked until the Shia militias found out what was happening and threatened to kill any Shia who passed on the salary of a Sunni.
(...) Nadia blames the Americans for the sectarian civil war that had engulfed her family. She says: "We were living together, Sunni and Shia, and there was no sign of sectarian differences between us in Iraq until the Americans came and encouraged sectarianism and let in foreign terrorists." Many Iraqis similarly see sectarianism as the work of the Americans. This is not entirely fair. Sectarian differences in Iraq were deeper under Saddam Hussein and his predecessors than many Iraqis now admit. But in one important respect, foreign occupation did encourage and deepen sectarianism. Previously a Sunni might feel differently from a Shia but still feel they were both Iraqis. Iraqi nationalism did exist, though Sunni and Shia defined it differently. But the Sunnis fought the U.S. occupation, unlike the Shia who were prepared to cooperate with it. After 2003, the Sunni saw the Shia who took a job as a policeman as not only a member of a different community, but as a traitor to his country. Sectarian and national antipathies combined to produce a lethal brew.
(...) America blithely invaded Iraq to overthrow Saddam Hussein to show its great political and military strength. Instead it demonstrated its weakness. The vastly expensive U.S. war machine failed to defeat a limited number of Sunni Arab guerrillas. International leaders such as Tony Blair who confidently allied themselves to Washington at the start of the war, convinced that they were betting on a winner, are either discredited or out of power.
(...) At times, President Bush seemed intent on finding out how much damage could be done to the U.S. by the conflict in Iraq. He did so by believing a high proportion of his own propaganda about the resistance to the occupation being limited in scale and inspired from outside the country. By 2007, the administration was even claiming that the fervently anti-Iranian Sunni insurgents were being equipped by Iran. It was a repeat performance of U.S, assertions four years earlier that Saddam Hussein was backing al-Qaeda. In this fantasy world, constructed to impress American voters, in which failures were sold as successes, it was impossible to devise sensible policies.

cockburn on iraq in 2007 (introduction to paperback version of his book):
At 3 am on January 11, 2007 a fleet of American helicopters made a sudden swoop on the long-established Iranian liaison office in the city of Arbil in northern Iraq. Their mission was to capture two senior Iranian security officials, Mohammed Jafari, the deputy head of the Iranian National Security Council, and General Minojahar Frouzanda, the head of intelligence of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards. What made the American raid so extraordinary is that both men were in Iraq at the official invitation of the Iraqi President Jalal Talabani, who held talks with them at his lakeside headquarters at Dokan in eastern Kurdistan. The Iranians had then asked to see Massoud Barzani, the president of the Kurdistan Regional Government, in the Kurdish capital Arbil. There was nothing covert about the meeting which was featured on Kurdish television.
(...) In the event the U.S. attack failed. It was only able to net five junior Iranian officials at the liaison office that had existed in Arbil for years, issuing travel documents, and which was being upgraded to a consular office by the Iraqi Foreign Ministry in Baghdad.
(...) If Iran had undertaken a similar venture by, for example, trying to kidnap the deputy head of the CIA when he was on an official visit to Pakistan or Afghanistan, then Washington might have considered the attempt a reason for going to war.
(...) The Arbil raid is significant because it was the first visible sign of a string of highly significant American policy decisions announced by President George W. Bush in an address to the nation broadcast in the U.S. a few hours earlier on January 10. There have been so many spurious turning points in the war -- such as the capture of Saddam Hussein in 2003, the handover of sovereignty to an Iraqi government in 2004, or the elections of 2005 -- that truly critical moments are obscured or underrated.
(...) President Bush did the exact opposite of what the Baker-Hamilton report had proposed. He identified Iran and Syria as America's prime enemies in Iraq, stating: "These two regimes are allowing terrorists and insurgents to use their territory to move in and out of Iraq." Instead of reducing the American commitment, Bush pledged to send 20,000 extra troops to Iraq to try to secure Baghdad. In other words, the U.S. was going to respond to its lack of success in the conflict by escalating both the war in Iraq and America's confrontation with Iran in the Middle East as a whole. The invasion of 2003 had destabilized the whole region; now Bush was about to deepen that instability.
(...) "People are saying that Bush's speech means that the occupation is going to go on a long time," the Iraqi political scientist Ghassan Attiyah told me soon after the President had stopped speaking. Although the new U.S. security plan for Baghdad, which began on February 14th, was sold as a temporary "surge" in troop numbers, it was evident that the reinforcements were there to stay.
(...) Training and equipping Iraqi troops to replace American soldiers -- so they could be withdrawn from Iraq -- had been the cornerstone of U.S. military planning since 2005. Now, the policy was being quietly downgraded, though not abandoned altogether.
(...) The U.S. Army was to go on fighting the five-million-strong Sunni community, as it had been doing since the capture of Baghdad. The Sunni demand for a timetable for U.S. withdrawal was not being met. At the same time, the U.S. was going to deal more aggressively with the 17 million Shias in Iraq. It would contest the control over much of Baghdad and southern Iraq of the Mehdi Army, the powerful militia led by the nationalist Shia cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, who is regarded with cult-like devotion by many Shia Iraqis. Not content with this, Washington was also more openly going to confront Iran, the most powerful of Iraq's neighbors.
(...) Iran was easy to demonize in the U.S., just as Saddam Hussein had been blamed four years earlier for everything wrong in Iraq and the Middle East. The New York Times, which had once uncritically repeated White House claims that Saddam possessed weapons of mass destruction, now ran articles on its front page saying that Iran was exporting sophisticated roadside bombs to Iraq that were killing American soldiers. There was no reference to the embarrassing discoveries of workshops making just such bombs in Baghdad and Basra.
(...) The extent of the military failure over the previous three-and-a-half years was extraordinary. The foreign media never quite made clear how little territory the U.S. and the Iraqi army fully controlled -- even in the heart of Baghdad. It was astonishing, in early 2007, to look out from the north-facing windows in the Hamra and see columns of black smoke billowing up from Haifa Street on the other side of the Tigris river. This is a two mile long militant Sunni corridor less than a mile from the northern end of the Green Zone. Since the early days of the fighting, the U.S. Army, supported by Iraqi army troops, had been unsuccessfully trying to drive out the insurgents who ruled it.
(...) American commanders often genuinely believed that they were in command of towns and cities which Iraqis, including the local police, told me were dominated by Sunni insurgents or Shia militia. On one occasion in early 2007, senior U.S. and Iraqi officers were giving a video press conference from Diyala, a much fought over province northeast of Baghdad, confidently claiming that they were winning the fight against the Sunni rebels. Even as they were speaking an insurgent squad attacked and captured the mayor's office in Baquba, the capital of Diyala.
(...) The addition, promised by Bush, of five extra brigades to the U.S. forces in Baghdad made, at least at first, some difference to security in the capital. The number of bodies of people tortured, shot in the head, and dumped in the street, went down from the horrific levels of late 2006. These death-squad killings were mostly of Sunni and were the work of the Mehdi Army or of army and police units collaborating with them.
(...) A few days before the security plan began, Muqtada al-Sadr stood down his militiamen, telling them to dump their arms and move out of Baghdad. He was intent on avoiding direct military confrontation with the U.S. reinforcements. But while the Shia were killing fewer Sunni, the Sunni insurgents were still slaughtering Shia civilians with massive suicide bombs, often vehicle-borne, targeting crowded market places. These did not stop and improved security measures made little difference.
(...) There was a central lesson of four years of war which Bush and Tony Blair never seemed to take on board, though it was obvious to anybody living in Iraq: the occupation was unpopular and becoming more so by the day. Anti-American guerrillas and militiamen always had enough water to swim in. The only community in Iraq that fully supported the U.S. presence was the Kurds -- and Kurdistan was not occupied.
(...) Opinion polls consistently show this trend. A comprehensive Iraqi survey has been conducted by ABC News, USAToday, the BBC, and ARD annually over the last three years. Its findings illuminate the most important trends in Iraqi politics. They show that, by March 2007, no less than 78% of Iraqis opposed the presence of U.S. forces, compared to 65% in November 2005 and 51% in February 2004. In the latter year, only 17% of the population thought that violence against U.S. forces was acceptable, while by 2007 the figure had risen to 51%. This pool of people sympathetic to Sunni insurgents and Shia militias was so large as to make it difficult to control and impossible to eliminate them.
(...) Some American soldiers see that the problem is not about a few infiltrators. "Any Iraqi officer who hasn't been assassinated or targeted for assassination is giving information or support to the insurgents," one US marine was quoted as saying. "Any Iraqi officer who isn't in bed with the insurgents is already dead."
(...) A prime reason why the U.S. supported Saddam Hussein during his war with Iran in 1980-88 is that it did not want a Shia clerical regime, possibly sympathetic to America's enemies in Tehran, to come to power in Iraq. It was the same motive that stopped President Bush senior pushing on to Baghdad and overthrowing Saddam after defeating the Iraqi army in Kuwait in 1991. After 2003, Washington was in the same quandary: If elections were held, the Shia, comprising 60% of the population that had been long excluded from power, were bound to win.
(...) At first, the U.S. tried to postpone elections, claiming that a census had to be held. It was only on the insistence of the Shia Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani that two elections were held in 2005, in which the Shia religious parties triumphed. Washington has never been comfortable with these Shia-Kurdish governments. It demanded that they try to reconcile with the Sunni -- though exactly how Shia and Kurdish leaders are supposed to do this, given that the main Sunni demand is a timetable for an American withdrawal, has never been clear.
(...) For their part, the Shia, have become increasingly suspicious that the U.S. and Britain do not intend to relinquish real control over security to the elected Iraqi government. There were many examples of this. For instance, in the Middle East the most important force underpinning every government is the intelligence service. In theory (as I explain in my book, The Occupation: War and Resistance in Iraq), the Iraqi government should get its information from the Iraqi National Intelligence Service (INIS) that was established in 2004 by the US-run Coalition Provisional Authority. But a peculiarity of the INIS is that its budget is not provided by the Iraqi Finance Ministry but by the CIA.
(...) Over the next three years, they paid $3 billion to fund its activities. During this time it was run by General Mohammed Shahwani, who had been the central figure in a CIA-run coup in 1996 against Saddam Hussein that had failed disastrously. For long periods he was even banned from attending Iraqi cabinet meetings. A former Iraqi cabinet minister, who was a member of the country's National Security Council, complained to me that "we only get information that the CIA wants us to hear." Iraqis did not fail to spot the extent to which the power of their elected government was being trimmed. The poll cited above showed that by Spring 2007 only 34% of Iraqis thought their country was being run by their own government; 59% believed the U.S. was in control. The Iraqi government had been robbed of legitimacy in the eyes of its own people.
(...) In the course of 2006 and 2007, Baghdad disintegrated into a dozen hostile cities at war with each other. There were fewer and fewer mixed Sunni and Shia neighborhoods. Terror engulfed the city like a poisonous cloud. There was a lot to be frightened of: Sunni insurgent groups; the Shia militias, Mehdi Army, and the Badr Organization; police and police commandos; the Iraqi army and the Americans.
(...) I was in contact with a Sunni family called al-Mashadani who lived in the west Baghdad district of Hurriya. It was under attack by Shia militiamen. Khalid, the father, worked as mechanic in the railway station. He was forced to leave his job when the repair yard was taken over by Shia militiamen. He stayed away and asked a Shia fellow worker to pick up his salary. This worked until the Shia militias found out what was happening and threatened to kill any Shia who passed on the salary of a Sunni.
(...) Nadia blames the Americans for the sectarian civil war that had engulfed her family. She says: "We were living together, Sunni and Shia, and there was no sign of sectarian differences between us in Iraq until the Americans came and encouraged sectarianism and let in foreign terrorists." Many Iraqis similarly see sectarianism as the work of the Americans. This is not entirely fair. Sectarian differences in Iraq were deeper under Saddam Hussein and his predecessors than many Iraqis now admit. But in one important respect, foreign occupation did encourage and deepen sectarianism. Previously a Sunni might feel differently from a Shia but still feel they were both Iraqis. Iraqi nationalism did exist, though Sunni and Shia defined it differently. But the Sunnis fought the U.S. occupation, unlike the Shia who were prepared to cooperate with it. After 2003, the Sunni saw the Shia who took a job as a policeman as not only a member of a different community, but as a traitor to his country. Sectarian and national antipathies combined to produce a lethal brew.
(...) America blithely invaded Iraq to overthrow Saddam Hussein to show its great political and military strength. Instead it demonstrated its weakness. The vastly expensive U.S. war machine failed to defeat a limited number of Sunni Arab guerrillas. International leaders such as Tony Blair who confidently allied themselves to Washington at the start of the war, convinced that they were betting on a winner, are either discredited or out of power.
(...) At times, President Bush seemed intent on finding out how much damage could be done to the U.S. by the conflict in Iraq. He did so by believing a high proportion of his own propaganda about the resistance to the occupation being limited in scale and inspired from outside the country. By 2007, the administration was even claiming that the fervently anti-Iranian Sunni insurgents were being equipped by Iran. It was a repeat performance of U.S, assertions four years earlier that Saddam Hussein was backing al-Qaeda. In this fantasy world, constructed to impress American voters, in which failures were sold as successes, it was impossible to devise sensible policies.

oil and america:
One could date it back to 1980 when President Jimmy Carter -- before his Habitat for Humanity days -- declared that Persian Gulf oil was "vital" to American national interests. So vital was it, he announced, that the U.S. would use "any means necessary, including military force" to sustain access to it"
(...) Or we could date it all the way back to World War II, when British officials declared Middle Eastern oil "a vital prize for any power interested in world influence or domination," and U.S. officials seconded the thought, calling it "a stupendous source of strategic power and one of the greatest material prizes in world history."
(...) We know, for example, that, before and after he ascended to the Vice-Presidency, Dick Cheney has had his eye squarely on the prize. In 1999, for example, he told the Institute of Petroleum Engineers that, when it came to satisfying the exploding demand for oil, "the Middle East, with two thirds of the world's oil and the lowest cost, is still where the prize ultimately lies." The mysterious Energy Task Force he headed on taking office in 2001 eschewed conservation or developing alternative sources as the main response to any impending energy crisis, preferring instead to make the Middle East "a primary focus of U.S. international energy policy." As part of this focus, the Task Force recommended that the administration put its energy, so to speak, into convincing Middle Eastern countries "to open up areas of their energy sectors to foreign investment" -- in other words, into a policy of reversing 25 years of state control over the petroleum industry in the region.
(...) In 2002, just a year after Cheney's Task Force completed its work, and before the U.S. had officially decided to invade Iraq, the State Department "established a working group on oil and energy," as part of its "Future of Iraq" project. It brought together influential Iraqi exiles, U.S. government officials, and international consultants. Later, several Iraqi members of the group became part of the Iraqi government. The result of the project's work was a "draft framework for Iraq's oil policy" that would form the foundation for the energy policy now being considered by the Iraqi Parliament.
(...) Indeed, Iraq could someday become the most important source of petrochemical energy on the planet. According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, Iraq possesses 115 billion barrels of proven oil reserves, third largest in the world (after Saudi Arabia and Iran). About two-thirds of its known oil reserves are located in Shia southern Iraq, and the final third in Kurdish northern Iraq. However, in energy terms, only about 10% of the country has actually been explored and there is good reason to believe that modern methods -- which have not been applied since the beginning of the Iraq-Iran War in 1980 -- might well uncover magnitudes more oil. Estimates of the possible new finds offered by officials of various interested governments range from 45 billion to 214 billion additional barrels, depending on the source; but some non-governmental experts see the final treasure exceeding 400 billion barrels. If the latter figure is correct, then Iraq would likely become the world's largest source of oil.
(...) Moreover, both its current fields and many of the potential new discoveries would be extremely cheap to access, if security weren't such a problem today in Iraq. James Paul of the international policy monitoring group, the Global Policy Forum, offers this positive view: "According to Oil and Gas Journal, Western oil companies estimate that they can produce a barrel of Iraqi oil for less than $1.50 and possibly as little as $1.... This is similar to production costs in Saudi Arabia and lower than virtually any other country."
(...) Knowledge of this level of underproduction was certainly one factor in Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz's pre-war prediction that the administration's invasion and occupation of Iraq would pay for itself; he hoped for a quick postwar increase in production to 3.5 million barrels per day or, at the $30 per barrel price of oil at that time, close to $40 billion per year in revenues. An expected expansion in production levels (once the oil giants were brought into the mix) to perhaps 6.5 million barrels, through the development of new oil fields or more efficient exploitation of existing fields, had the potential to more than cover the expected American short-term military costs and leave the new Iraqi government flush as well.
(...) Paul Bremer, the new head of the American occupation, promulgated a series of laws designed, among other things, to kick-start the development of Iraqi oil. In addition to attempting to transfer management of existing oil facilities (well heads, refineries, pipelines, and shipping) to multinational corporations, he also set about creating an oil-policy framework, unique in the region, that would allow the major companies to develop the country's proven reserves and even to begin drilling new wells.
(...) [resistance to these plans] All these plans were, however, quickly frustrated, both by the growing Sunni insurgency and by civil resistance. Iraq's oil workers quickly unionized -- even though Bremer extended Saddam's prohibition on unions in state-owned companies -- and effectively resisted the transfer of management duties to foreign companies. In one noteworthy moment, the oil workers actually refused to take orders from Bechtel officials in the oil hub of Basra, thus preserving their own jobs as well as the right of the Iraqi state-owned Southern Oil Company to continue to control the operation in that region. Bechtel's management contract was subsequently voided. At the same time, the growing insurgency, acting on a general Iraqi understanding that a major goal of the occupation was to "steal" Iraqi oil, systematically began to attack the oil pipelines that traveled through the Sunni areas of the country. Within a few months, all oil exports in the northern part of Iraq were interrupted -- and the northern export pipelines have remained generally unusable ever since.
(...) To resistance of various sorts must be added the "contribution" of the major American corporations involved in "reconstructing" Iraq, notably Halliburton and Bechtel. These crony corporations, with close ties to the Bush administration, accepted huge fees to rehabilitate dilapidated or damaged oil facilities. Almost without fail, they chose not to repair existing plants locally or to employ the raft of skilled Iraqi technicians who had used remarkable ingenuity in maintaining these facilities during a dozen years of UN sanctions. Working under cost-plus agreements that guaranteed a fixed profit rate no matter how much an operation ultimately cost, they preferred instead to install expensive new proprietary equipment. Then, in the absence of any outside oversight, they ran up huge expenses and frequently failed to complete their contracts, leaving the oil facilities they were servicing in states of disrepair or partial repair -- and equipped with technology that local technicians could not service.
(...) hen technical sovereignty was finally handed over to an appointed Iraqi government headed by the CIA's favorite Iraqi exile, Iyad Allawi, in June 2004, the new premier embraced Bremer's policy, but to no avail. The international oil companies were no more impressed with his future than they had been with Bremer's. Like Wolfowitz, they knew that Iraq "floats on a sea of oil"; unlike him, they were no dreamers. They weren't willing to risk their capital in the dangerous and legally ambiguous circumstances then prevailing. As a result, the first two years of Bush administration efforts to "access" Iraqi oil failed -- and dismally so at that. Average production never exceeded the bottom-of-the-barrel 2.5 million barrels Saddam's regime managed to extract on its worst days. By 2006, production had slipped below 2 million barrels per day.
(...) The State Department planners had concluded that Production Sharing Agreements -- a method that granted multinational oil companies effective control of oil fields without transferring permanent ownership to them -- would be the basic instrument through which a future "independent" Iraq would develop new oil fields. Wary by now of being seen as the chief advocate of this policy, which it so desperately wanted in place, the Bush administration concocted a strategy that would enlist the international community in pressuring Iraq to adopt its program. This was done by making the International Monetary Fund (IMF) a key player in Iraqi oil policy. Through loans in the 1980s and reparations imposed for his invasion of Kuwait in 1990, Saddam had accumulated $120 billion in external debt, the largest per capita debt in the world and a potentially insurmountable obstacle to economic recovery, even in oil-rich Iraq. One option available to the new government was to declare this debt "odious," a technical term in international law referring to debt accumulated by authoritarian rulers for their own personal or political aggrandizement.
(...) Saddam's expansionist war against Iran, his use of public funds to build ostentatious monuments and palaces, his transfer of billions to his personal accounts, and his failure to maintain the infrastructure of the country all were excellent evidence that the debt was indeed odious; and the U.S. claimed as much for almost $40 billion of it, held by 19 industrialized countries known as the Paris Club. Instead of seeking to cancel this debt (and the remaining $80 billion) entirely, however, the Bush administration sent James Baker, former Secretary of State under George H. W. Bush, to the Paris Club to negotiate conditional forgiveness. The resulting agreement immediately forgave $12 billion, but left $28 billion on the books. A second $12 billion would be abrogated when the Iraqi government signed onto "a standard International Monetary Fund program," and a further $8 billion three years later, after the IMF confirmed Iraqi compliance. Even if "successful," almost $8 billion would still be outstanding to the Paris Club -- together with $80 billion not covered by the agreement.
(...) The "standard International Monetary Fund program," not surprisingly, included the now familiar American policies regarding Iraqi oil, as well as the use of Profit Sharing Agreements and a host of other provisions that would open the Iraqi economy as a whole, and the oil sector in particular, to investment by multinational corporations. Among the most punitive of the provisions was a demand for an end to the economic breadbasket that guaranteed all Iraqi families low prices for fuel and food staples. In a country with, by 2005, somewhere between 30% and 70% unemployment, average wage levels under $100 per month, and escalating inflation, these Saddam-era subsidies meant the difference between basic subsistence and disaster for a large proportion of Iraqis.
(...) Zaid Al-Ali, an international lawyer working on development issues in Iraq, described the agreement as a "perfect illustration of how the industrialized world has used debt as a tool to force developing nations to surrender sovereignty over their economies."
(...) The newly elected Iraqi National Assembly promptly denounced this agreement as "a new crime committed by the creditors who financed Saddam's oppression." This forceful expression reflected the opinions of the Assembly's constituents. After all, 76% of Iraqis believed that the main reason for the Bush administration's invasion was "to control Iraqi oil."
(...) The U.S. then began pressuring the Iraqi government to draft a definitive petrochemical law that would conform to the IMF guidelines. Given the levels of resistance to the very idea, this work was conducted in secret and took until the end of 2006 to complete. As independent journalist Joshua Holland described the process: "Just months after the Iraqis elected their first constitutional government, USAID sent a BearingPoint adviser to provide the Iraqi Oil Ministry 'legal and regulatory advice in drafting the framework of petroleum and other energy-related legislation, including foreign investment'.... The Iraqi Parliament had not yet seen a draft of the oil law as of July [2006], but by that time... it had already been reviewed and commented on by U.S. Energy Secretary Sam Bodman, who also 'arranged for Dr. Al-Shahristani to meet with nine major oil companies -- including Shell, BP, ExxonMobil, ChevronTexaco and ConocoPhillips -- for them to comment on the draft.'"
(...) When the "Draft Hydrocarbon Law" was finally delivered to the Iraqi Parliament on February 18, 2007, key provisions had already been leaked and immediately denounced by the full spectrum of the Iraqi opposition. Taking turns registering dismay were the majority of the Parliament, a wide range of government officials, the leadership of major Sunni political parties, the union of oil workers, the Sadrists -- the most powerful Shia grouping -- and the visible leadership of the insurgency. All this led to many changes in the law, including the removal of all mention of either privatization or Production Sharing Contracts, which would have given multinational oil companies 15-25 years of basically unregulated operational control over Iraqi oil facilities. The amended version in no way excluded the use of PSAs, but it removed the explosive designation from the actual wording of the law.
(...) [PSA´s]Production sharing agreements are generally applied in circumstances where there is a strong possibility that oil exploration will be extremely costly or even fail, and/or where extraction is likely to prove prohibitively expensive. To offset huge and risky investments, the contracting company is guaranteed a proportion of the profits, if and when oil is extracted and sold. In the most common of these agreements, the proportion remains very high until all development costs are amortized, allowing the investing company to recoup its investment expenditures (if oil is found), and then to be rewarded with a larger-than-normal profit margin for the remainder of the contract which, in the Iraqi case, could extend for up to 25 years. None of these conditions apply in Iraq: huge reservoirs of easily accessible oil are already proven to exist, with more equally accessible fields likely to be discovered with little expense. This is why none of Iraq's neighbors utilize PSAs. Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Iran, and the United Arab Emirates all pay the multinationals a fixed rate to explore and develop their fields; and all of the profits become state revenues.
(...)The advocates of PSAs in Iraq justify their use by arguing that $20 billion would be needed to develop the Iraqi fields fully and that favorable PSAs are the only way to attract such heavy doses of finance capital under the current highly dangerous circumstances. This assertion seems, however, to be little more than a smokescreen. No major oil companies are willing to invest in Iraq now, no matter how sweet the deal. If order is restored, on the other hand, Iraq would have no trouble attracting vast amounts of finance capital to develop reserves that could well be worth in excess of $10 trillion and hence would have no need whatsoever for PSAs.
(...) Based on leaked information, journalists reported that the PSAs envisioned by the Iraqi petrochemical law contained extremely favorable provisions for the oil companies, in which they would be entitled to 70% of profits until development expenses were amortized and 20% afterwards. This would have guaranteed them at least twice the typical profit margin over the long run and many times that figure during the initial years.
(...) There are other elements in the law (and the possible PSA contracts) that have also roused resistance inside Iraq. Among the most controversial:
· Insofar as PSAs or their legal equivalent were enacted, Iraq would lose control over what levels of oil the country produced with the potential to substantially weaken the grip of OPEC on the oil market.
· The law would allow the oil companies to fully repatriate all profits from oil sales, almost insuring that the proceeds would not be reinvested in the Iraqi economy.
· The Iraqi government would not have control over oil company operations inside Iraq. Any disputes would be referred instead to pro-industry international arbitration panels.
· Contacting companies would not be obliged to hire Iraqi workers, and could pursue the current policy of employing American technicians and South Asian manual laborers.
· No contracts would be public documents.
(...) Several African countries with vast mineral riches have been subjected to these sorts of conditions, with large multinational companies extracting both minerals and profits while returning only a tiny fraction of the proceeds to the local population. As the resources are taken out of the ground and the country, the local population actually becomes poorer, while the potential for future prosperity is drained.
(...) [prospects for resistance]The Parliament itself may be the first line of defense. It challenged the original IMF agreement and has refused to consider the bill for two months, already missing a March deadline for passage that American politicians of both parties had pronounced an important "benchmark" by which to judge the viability of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's government.
(...) Rafiq Latta, a London-based oil analyst, told Nation reporter Christian Parenti, "The whole culture of the ministry opposes [the law].... Those guys ran the industry very well all through the years of sanctions. It was an impressive job, and they take pride in 'their' oil."
(...) Perhaps most formidable of all is the Federation of Oil Unions, with 26,000 members and allies throughout organized labor. The oil workers overturned contracts in 2003 and 2004 that would have placed substantial oil facilities under multinational corporate control; and they initiated a vigorous campaign against the U.S. sponsored oil program as early as June 2005 -- calling a conference to oppose privatization attended by "workers, academics, and international civil-society groups." In January 2006, they convened a convention composed of all major Iraqi union groups in Amman, Jordan, which issued a manifesto opposing the entire neo-liberal U.S. program for Iraq, including any compromise on national control of oil production.
(...) Iraq's trade unions, speaking in a single voice, declared that: "Iraqi public opinion strongly opposes the handing of authority and control over the oil to foreign companies, that aim to make big profits at the expense of the people. They aim to rob Iraq's national wealth by virtue of unfair, long term oil contracts that undermine the sovereignty of the State and the dignity of the Iraqi people."
(...) He [union leader] then called on the government to consult Iraqi oil experts (who had not participated in drafting the law) and "ask their opinion before sinking Iraq into an ocean of dark injustice."
(...) Finally -- and no small matter -- the armed resistance is also against the oil law. The Sunni insurgency underscored its opposition by assassinating Vice President Adel Abdul Mahdi, a major advocate of the pending law, on the day the bill was made public. The significance of the opposition of the Sunni insurgency is amplified by the stance of the Sadrists, the most rebellious segment of the Shia majority. Sadr spokesman Sheikh Gahaith Al Temimi warned journalist Christian Parenti that while the Sadrists would "welcome" foreign investment in oil, they would do so only "under certain conditions. We want our oil to be developed, not stolen. If a bad law were to be passed, all people of Iraq would resist it."
(...) Active opposition by the Parliament alone, or by the unions alone, or by the Sunni insurgency alone, or by the Sadrists alone might be sufficient to defeat or disable the law. The possibility that such disparate groups might find unity around this issue, mobilizing both the government bureaucracy and overwhelming public opinion to their cause, holds a much greater threat: the possibility of creating a unified force that might push beyond the oil law to a more general opposition to the American occupation.
(...) he likelihood that any future Iraqi government which takes on a nationalist mantel will consider such an agreement in any way binding is nil. One day in perhaps the not so distant future, that "law," even if briefly the law of the land, is likely to find itself in the dustbin of history, along with Saddam's various oil deals. As a result, the Bush administration's "capture of new and existing oil and gas fields" is likely to end as a predictable fiasco.

al-maliki´s support waning:
Legislators from several parties told USA TODAY that al-Maliki lacks the support in parliament to push through laws, such as a plan to distribute oil revenues, that could reduce tensions between Sunnis and Shiites. Iraq's parliament has failed to pass major legislation since a U.S.-led security plan began on Feb. 14.
(...) "The present government is not competent," said Dawood, a Shiite legislator. "It's more or less paralyzed, inactive. I doubt very much that this government can continue in power much longer."
(...) Pending constitutional amendments on issues such as tax revenue sharing have stalled, said Ayad al-Samarrai, deputy chairman of the Iraqi Islamic Party, a Sunni group. He said al-Maliki's poor reputation among Sunnis was partly to blame. "We don't see any progress" on sectarian reconciliation, al-Samarrai said.

al-sadr and the occupation (cockburn):
Menacingly for the US, Mr Sadr called on Iraqi police and soldiers, many of them his supporters, to oppose the occupation. His new anti-American campaign is in keeping with Iraqi opinion going by a recent poll by ABC, the BBC, ARD and USA Today. It showed that 78 per cent of Iraqis oppose the presence of US forces in Iraq. More than 7 out of 10 Shia--and almost all Sunni--say the US military presence makes security worse.
(...)A significant change in Iraqi politics over the past four years has been the growing hostility of the Shia towards the US. Although the government of Mr Maliki is in effect a Shia-Kurdish coalition, 59 per cent of Iraqis think the US controls things in Iraq according to the poll. Many Shia see the US as covertly manipulating the real levers of power in order to exclude them. For instance the Iraqi National Intelligence Service, the main security service, under General Mohammed Shahwani, is wholly funded by the CIA at a reported cost of $3 bn since 2004.

iraq:
Joseph Chamie, former UN director of the Population Division, said sanitation in the country had regressed to 1950 levels. A recent UN Population Department study showed 1/3 of Iraqis living in poverty; more than 20% in destitution. More than half a million Baghdad residents have no access to water for most of the day; electricity for 3 hours daily. One of eight Iraqis has fled the country. Almost one of nine has died since George W. Bush liberated them; almost one of four Iraqis gone.
(...) In late September 2002, I interviewed Deputy Prime Minister Tariq Aziz and Iraqi Parliament speaker Sadoun Hamadi (now deceased). In addition, I talked to dozens of Iraqis in Baghdad, Najaf, Karballah, Babylon and Mahmoudadyiah. The Sunnis, Shias, Christians, Kurds and Turkmen with whom I spoke all identified themselves as Iraqis.. Whatever their religious or ethnic differences, they agreed on one thing: "Don't come." No matter how much they hated Saddam Hussein, they concurred: a US invasion and occupation would worsen Iraq's situation. "You have no idea what will happen if your armies come here," said Ghassan, an engineer.
(...) He observed the April 9 fall of Baghdad and waited for a US plan to allow Iraq to recover and reconstruct under a viable new government. Instead, US authorities disbanded the coherent institutions--the military (more than 300,000 men with weapons) and the Ba'ath Party. This created massive unemployment and left Iraq without an internal security force. In September 2003, Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) Chief Paul Bremer ordered the privatization of 192 public sector companies. People whom Allawi refers to as Saddam's old boys, a "commercial gang," grabbed the new businesses. Without army and police, looting began. The thieves sold Iraq's infrastructural equipment in neighboring countries. Allawi alleges that the US failed to reconstruct Iraq's electricity, health care and sanitation infrastructure, but instead offered the media an "insipid retelling of 'success' stories."
(...) Bush's bumbling has led to an immense increase in military spending as well. Spending on weapons far outranks education and health outlays. Bush still uses fear as his main political tool. He screamed at Congress for more funds for Iraq and Afghanistan wars and behaved as if they had gotten the country into the mess. Bush claimed the "courage" to take the country to war. Congress and the media rubber stamped his decision. They collectively lack the courage, integrity and responsibility to admit the error and stage a rapid US withdrawal. So, the rest of us had better keep pushing hard.

report from iraq (cockburn):
The attacks are likely to speed the return of the Mehdi Army in Shia areas to provide protection. It was stood down by its leader, the nationalist cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, as the US-Iraqi security crackdown began on 14 February. When Iraqi army soldiers and a US patrol entered Sadriyah after the bombing they were met with jeers and stones.
(...) The US security plan has never had the political as well as the military components essential to success. It should have encouraged more Iraqi groups to enter the political process and eschew violence. In fact it has done the opposite. The US has been pushing the government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki to break with Mr Sadr, who has a very large following among the Shia majority. Mr Sadr withdrew his six ministers from the government this week saying that Mr Maliki had failed to set a deadline for a US troop withdrawal. But the Sadrists are also angry that US and Iraqi government troops have arrested 800 of their men, including Sheikh Qais Khazali, one of their leaders. Mr Sadr reportedly believes the Prime Minister reneged on an agreement not to purse the Mehdi Army if it did not fight.
(...) The soaring number of people being executed by the government since the death penalty was reintroduced in 2004 is condemned in a new report by Amnesty International. It says that 270 people are under sentence of death and more than 100 have been executed, almost all of them since the start of 2006. The report says many of them only confessed under torture.

on uniting against the occupation (zangana):
There is only one solution to this disaster, and that is for the US and Britain to accept that the Iraqi resistance is fighting to end the occupation. And to acknowlege that it consists of ordinary Iraqis, not only al-Qaida, not just Sunnis or Shias, not those terrorists - as Tony Blair called them - inspired by neighbouring countries such as Iran. To recognise that Iraqis are proud, peace-loving people, and that they hate occuption, not each other. And to understand that the main targets of the resistance are not Iraqi civilians. According to Brookings, the independent US research institute, 75% of recorded attacks are directed at occupation forces, and a further 17% at Iraqi government forces. The average number of attacks has more than doubled in the past year to about 185 a day. That is 1,300 a week, and more than 5,500 a month.

blood for oil (paul street):
Just as both sides of the Cold War possessed their own very different interests in incorrectly calling the Soviet Union “socialist,” both sides in the current U.S. war-funding and timetable debate have an interest in falsely describing the Congressional votes as “antiwar.”
(...) For their part, the Democrats wish to exploit the moral prestige of antiwar sentiment. Sixty percent of U.S. citizens oppose the increase of U.S. troop levels in Iraq. The occupation is now opposed by two-thirds of Americans. Nearly three fourths (72 percent) of Americans polled last year said that all U.S. in Iraq should come home by the end of 2006. Democrats rode this antiwar sentiment into Congressional majority power last November.
(...) The Democratic Congress has not exercised its power to end the war. It has not passed an antiwar bill.
(...) In the March 23rd House vote, all but eight of the Democrats (Dennis Kucinich, John Lewis, Barbara Lee, Maxine Waters, Diane Watson, Lynn Woolsey, Mike McNulty and Mike Michaud) basically gave Bush the money
he needs to continue and expand the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and possibly to initiate an assault on Iran. If the Congressional bill was enacted tomorrow, without a Bush veto, it would fund Bush’s audacious, democracy-defying Surge (escalation) to the supplemental tune of $124 billion – considerably more than the White House actually requested.
(...) The distant troop withdrawal proposed by the House bill is hitched to the same Iraqi government “benchmarks” that Bush announced in his nationally televised escalation speech of January 10, 2007. The benchmarks for “withdrawal” include the passage by the Iraqi parliament of an imperialist, neoliberal petroleum law. Hidden beneath largely diversionary language about “revenue-sharing” across Iraq’s regions, this law will try to help subject Iraq’s stupendous oil reserves to domination by Western capital and the American Empire. The “withdrawal” envisioned by Congress would only remove combat troops and only on the eve of the 2008 elections. In the names of “diplomatic protection,” “counter-terrorism,” and the “training and advising of Iraqi Security Forces” (translation: OIL protection), it would leave U.S bases and forces in Iraq for an indefinite period. However much they claim to oppose permanent military bases in Iraq, leading Democrats within and beyond Congress imagine an American military presence in Iraq for decades to come.
(...) Saddest of all, perhaps, 90 percent of the House’s 71 Progressive Caucus voted for the supplemental authorization bill. This was a truly depressing “progressive” performance, one that speaks volumes about the absence of anything that deserves to be considered a relevant “Left” inside the narrow-spectrum U.S. political system.
(...) Deeply committed to the doctrinal notion that the U.S is an inherently noble, benevolent and democratic force in the world, top Democrats insist on combining their calls for (partial and qualified) “withdrawal” with preposterous and offensive claims that the U.S. has done everything it can “for the Iraqis.” As leading “Blue Dog” (right-wing) Democratic Rep. John Tanner (D-TN) told the Public Broadcasting System a few weeks ago:

“We…need to send a message to the Iraqis. Look, this has been four-plus years now, four years and three days. We have lost over 3,000 people. We have lost over 25,000 wounded. The Iraqis have had Saddam Hussein taken out. They have had two elections. They have had a government now for over a year. And we see no progress on them….it's time for them to step up. I am past the point of asking young military families in this country to continue to die and the American taxpayers to spend $2.5 billion a week in Iraq to help people who are seemingly unwilling or unable to get along. And, while they're shooting at each other, both sides are shooting at us.”

“I don't -- I think it's time for us not to be the policemen on the beat in the city of Baghdad. We're not talking about leaving the area. We're not going to leave the area. But I think that a timeline and a message to the Iraqis: Look, it's time for you people to get along. We're not going to stay here open-endedly, shedding our blood and our taxpayer money forever.”

(...)This by now standard Democratic Party rhetoric advances an interesting take on the U.S. assault on Mesopotamia four years after world history’s most powerful military state invaded that country, sacked its civil society, and essentially disbanded its state. The U.S. has deliberately provoked and fueled the very internal Iraqi factional and religious strife that leading Democrats cite as an example of Iraqis’ hopeless division.
(...) Top Democrats are just as committed as the Republicans to preventing what would amount to a geopolitical, world-systemic catastrophe for the American Empire: the loss of U.S. control over Middle Eastern oil. The notion of the people and/or states of that region doing whatever they wish with the remarkable, economically and geopolitically super-strategic oil that sits under the nominally sovereign soils – possibly even forming production and sales agreements with the Asian Security Grid (thereby accelerating the United States’ devolution to the status of a second-rate world power) – is anathema to the good Men and Women of Empire atop both wings of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Party.
(...) [oil privatization details] Iraq’s oil wealth, by the way, is significantly greater than often assumed. Its proven reserves of 115 barrels make it the third largest oil state in the world (behind Saudi Arabia and Canada). But recent reports suggest that it may possess an additional 200 million barrels, making it home to one fourth of the world’s petroleum. Thanks to three decades of largely U.S-imposed chaos (war, sanctions, civic collapse, government dissolution and the like), moreover, Iraq’s spectacular oil reserves are remarkably “underdeveloped.” They are exceptionally “virginal” – close to the surface, and thus accessible for rapid and cheap extraction some day (A.K. Gupta, “Oil, Neoliberalism and Sectarianism in Iraq,” Z Magazine, April 2007)
(...) Next May, the Iraq National Assembly is likely to finalize petroleum legislation worked up by the Iraq cabinet in “consultation” with the White House, the world’s leading petroleum corporations (the “majors”) and the U.S.-based neoliberal consulting firm BearingPoint – the proud recipient of a $240 million federal grant to help create “a competitive private sector” in Iraq (Gupta, “Oil, Neoliberalism and Sectarianism in Iraq”)
(...) the final bill will certainly mandate “Production Sharing Agreements” (PSAs) that could (some day) confer astonishing profits on giant Western oil corporations at the expense of the Iraqi people and the Iraqi government. Currently used in relation to just 12 percent of the world’s oil reserves, PSAs leave ultimate oil ownership with the governments under whose soil petroleum sits. But they abolish the state’s monopoly over oil production, something that is more than sufficient to satisfy the profit lust of Western capital. Consistent with Standard Oil founder John D. Rockefeller’s famous managerial-capitalist maxim “own nothing, control everything,” PSAs reserve the oil industry’s leading profit centers – exploration and production – for private, generally multinational firms on terms that are highly favorable to those companies (see Antonia Juhasz, “Spoils of War: Oil, the U.S.-Middle East Free Trade Area and the Bush Agenda,” In These Times, January 2007).
(...) the “majors” and a number of other giant global firms will be permitted to recoup 60 percent or more of their Iraqi oil revenues during the initial “cost recovery” phase of militarily imposed Mesopotamian oil privatization. Profit rates will then fall to 20 percent, still double the PSA norm, with a special provision permitting transnational firms to “transfer any net profits from petroleum operations to outside Iraq.” Another part of the draft legislation requires any dispute between external oil corporations and the Iraq government to be resolved through international arbitration – something that will certainly favor Western (chiefly Anglo and U.S.) capital over “sovereign” Iraq.
(...) The draft law provides no guarantees for Iraqi state participation, requiring the Iraqi state oil company to compete against global firms for the right to explore and produce new oil fields in occupied Iraq. Depending on how relevant authorities interpret the draft law’s call for “the speedy and efficient development of the fields discovered but partially or entirely not yet developed,” the proportion of the Iraqi oil prize that could be open to neoliberal “privatization lite” ranges from two-thirds to one hundred percent. Not surprisingly, the official U.S. position is that none of Iraq’s oil fields are fully developed, something that will permit the big transnationals to move into any and all of the nation’s oil fields.
As the New York–based Global Policy Forum noted last year:

“According to oil industry experts, new exploration will probably raise Iraq’s reserves to 200+ billion barrels of high-grade crude, extraordinarily cheap to produce. The four giant firms located in the US and the UK have been keen to get back into Iraq, from which they were excluded with the nationalization of 1972. During the final years of the Saddam era, they envied companies from France, Russia, China, and elsewhere, who had obtained major contracts. But UN sanctions (kept in place by the US and the UK) kept those contracts inoperable. Since the invasion and occupation of Iraq in 2003, everything has changed. In the new setting, with Washington running the show, ‘friendly’ companies expect to gain most of the lucrative oil deals that will be worth hundreds of billions of dollars in profits in the coming decades. The new Iraqi constitution of 2005, greatly influenced by US advisors, contains language that guarantees a major role for foreign companies. Negotiators hope soon to complete deals on Production Sharing Agreements that will give the companies control over dozens of fields, including the fabled super-giant Majnoon. However, despite pressure from the US government and foreign oil companies, the current Iraqi government has not passed a national oil law” (Global Policy Forum, “Oil and Iraq,” http://www.global policy.org/security/oil/irqindx.Htm).

(...) [on democracy?] Washington’s close alliance with the arch-reactionary oil-rich state of Saudi Arabia and the administration’s sponsorship of an attempted coup against the popularly elected government of oil-rich Venezuela are two excellent examples – the Empire’s assertion that it is promoting democracy in Iraq is coldly contradicted by the curious fact that Iraq’s draft oil law has received input from the majors, the White House, the International Monetary Fund and BearingPoint, but NOT the Iraqi public.
(...) According to a 2006 poll, 76 percent of Iraqis think the real reason for the invasion was a U.S. desire “to control Iraqi oil.” Nobody who wishes to be a member in good standing of the U.S, political class can afford to “sound like” three fourths of the “liberated” nation’s people, less than 1 percent of who think the U.S. invaded to “export democracy.” As Chomsky likes to say, Orwell would be impressed.
(...) Meanwhile we continue to incredulously wonder “Why Do They Hate Us?” Yes, after we’ve “sacrificed” so much “blood and money,” as top Democrats like to say, so much “for them.”

sadr bloc pulling out of iraqi gov't (al-jazeera):
"We are going to declare our withdrawal from government because the prime minister does not want to make a timetable for the withdrawal of foreign forces from Iraq," one official said.
(...) The move is unlikely to bring down the government, but it could create tensions in the fractious Shia-led coalition. The al-Sadr movement's 30 MPs will continue to attend parliament.

iraqi government defends occupation, iraqi government breaks up:
Abdul-Mehdi al-Muteyri said Sadr's movement, which has six ministers in cabinet including those for health and agriculture, would not remain in a government which he said constantly defended the U.S. occupation. "Our withdrawal from the government is now inevitable and might take place in a matter of days," he said.

on the unraveling of the political process in iraq:
The largest Sunni bloc in Parliament may intend to withdraw from the political process, al-Melaf reports in Arabic. The news agency cites an "informed source" inside the Tawafuq Front who reportedly said that the outstanding arrest warrants for Tawafuq MPs have led the bloc to plan its withdrawal announcement.
(...) A Tawafuq withdrawal from the political process could deliver a serious blow to the Iraqi regime. Tawafuq has remained in the opposition in Parliament, but its participation in the body has provided lent legitimation to the Iraqi regime by providing Sunni representation in the process. Absent the Tawafuq presence in Parliament, this claim of Iraqi Sunni Arab representation in the political process would be harder to sustain.