It's not about OPEC oil, is it? A Kurdish spokesman (PUK and KPD) says:
"We are going to 'demonopolise' the oil," Dara Attar, an Iraqi Kurd oil consultant told AFP after two days of meetings in London.
"The government is going to be a federal state, therefore the economy will be different. It's going to be done in a way to serve the federal state," said Attar, one of a 15-strong body charged by the US State Department with planning Iraq post-war oil policy.
Iraq will remain a member of the Organisation of Petrolium Exporting Countries, but will not limit its production to stabilize the international oil market if it can produce more -- once its installations have been repaired.
In other words -- cheap oil until the end of the world....
There is some pretty sensible analysis of Iraqi Shi'a wait-and-see politics over at Daily Kos. "While they clearly need Saddam gone from power, they certainly have no intention to exchange a Sunni dictatorship for an American viceroy." Or if you prefer, Please declare victory over the Ba'athists now, so the real contest can begin.
A Puzzle
Evidence: They're long dead, probably from around 1991.
Evidence: Many have gunshot wounds to the head.
Evidence "found at the scene suggests many of the deaths occurred on the premises." So who are they?
i) Iran says they're Iranians (can we tell from the uniforms perhaps, dogtags?)
ii) Human Rights Watch thinks they're Iraqi opponents of Saddam.
iii) Baghdad claims they're corpses of Iraqi troops killed over in Iran and shipped back home for burial.
I didn't realize it yesterday how much it echoes Katyn. Katyn. No-one wanted to believe the Nazis, but they were indeed being truthful. And it took the Russians fifty-odd years to admit it. On a point of personal interest: one of my grandfathers narrowly escaped those quicklime pits in the pine forests near Smolensk. He wound up in a Roumanian internment camp instead and later escaped westwards. But that's another story.
One day after, NYT reports that the buiding (near Basra) is a morgue housing the bodies of Iranian soldiers. So Theory i) obtains, as far as we know. Evidence "found at the scene" (which wasn't described in the source) was incorrect.
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There is some pretty sensible analysis of Iraqi Shi'a wait-and-see politics over at Daily Kos. "While they clearly need Saddam gone from power, they certainly have no intention to exchange a Sunni dictatorship for an American viceroy." Or if you prefer, Please declare victory over the Ba'athists now, so the real contest can begin.
A Puzzle
Evidence: They're long dead, probably from around 1991.
Evidence: Many have gunshot wounds to the head.
Evidence "found at the scene suggests many of the deaths occurred on the premises." So who are they?
i) Iran says they're Iranians (can we tell from the uniforms perhaps, dogtags?)
ii) Human Rights Watch thinks they're Iraqi opponents of Saddam.
iii) Baghdad claims they're corpses of Iraqi troops killed over in Iran and shipped back home for burial.
I didn't realize it yesterday how much it echoes Katyn. Katyn. No-one wanted to believe the Nazis, but they were indeed being truthful. And it took the Russians fifty-odd years to admit it. On a point of personal interest: one of my grandfathers narrowly escaped those quicklime pits in the pine forests near Smolensk. He wound up in a Roumanian internment camp instead and later escaped westwards. But that's another story.
- bruno 4-06-2003 7:09 pm
One day after, NYT reports that the buiding (near Basra) is a morgue housing the bodies of Iranian soldiers. So Theory i) obtains, as far as we know. Evidence "found at the scene" (which wasn't described in the source) was incorrect.
- bruno 4-07-2003 9:54 pm