Little to celebrate in IraqRobert Dreyfuss, The Nation: There's little to celebrate about the US pullback in Iraq. More than six years after the US invasion, Iraq is shattered. Hundreds of thousands of Iraqis are dead -- far more, incidentally, than even the largest estimates of the number of Iraqis who died during 35 years of Saddam Hussein's rule -- its social fabric is utterly destroyed, its economy is in ruins, and its dominant political faction is in hock to neighboring Iran. And now what?
William Rivers Pitt, Truthout: While Iraq's Shia population celebrated in the streets and Iraq's Sunni population crouched in fear, another group got right to business: 'The long awaited auction of licenses to develop Iraq's huge oil reserves began Tuesday amid unusual contentiousness,' reported the New York Times... 'as multinationals demanded far more revenue from every barrel of increased production than the authorities were willing to allow. Scores of Chinese, Russian, American and British oil executives, representing eight of the world's top 10 non-state oil companies, gathered in a hotel meeting room in the Green Zone. They listened closely on headphones to translations as bids for six oil fields and two natural gas fields were read out and then rushed into consultations.'
Anonymous, Truthout: And so George W. Bush and Dick Cheney are closer than ever to achieving their original goal of securing Iraq's oil for the multinational oil companies who got them into the White House in the first place. Success is near, and all for the cost of a percent or so of one generation's young men and women, and a few trillion dollars.
