The Rag Blog

The Wall Street Journal’s main Hugo Chavez antagonist is its self-styled Latin American “expert” Mary Anastasia O’Grady who makes up for in imagination and vitriol what she lacks in knowledge and journalistic integrity. She, however, wasn’t assigned to write the May 1 Journal attack piece reporters David Luhnow in Mexico City and Peter Millard in Caracas got to do titled “How Chavez Aims to Weaken US.” Of course, when it comes to Venezuela, the issue is oil and Chavez’s having the “audacity” to want his people to benefit most from their own resources, not predatory foreign oil companies the way it used to be when the country’s leadership only served the interests of capital ignoring essential social needs. No longer.

Chavez, of course, announced months ago his government would complete renationalizing his country’s oil reserves when state oil company PDVSA became the majority shareholder May 1 in four Orinoco River basin oil projects with a minimum 60% ownership in joint ventures with foreign partners. The plan was broadly denounced in the US major media with Journal columnist O’Grady writing April 16 “Chavez (was) brimming with bravado as he shredded (the) oil contracts (telling) foreigners to step aside because he’s in charge now (but the move will likely) end up hitting the ‘commandante of the revolution’ in the pocketbook (because of) corruption, incompetence and mismanagement” meaning Venezuela will now run all its own oil operations and forge its own future, not Big Oil O’Grady wants sole right to do it. No longer indeed, and O’Grady’s not pleased. She’s also dead wrong in her outlook for Venezuela’s oil future run by PDVSA with foreign partners, but don’t ever expect her to admit it.

So is the New York Times agreeing April 10 with O’Grady and other corporate media Big Oil cheerleaders. The Times used charged language condemning Chavez’s “revolutionary flourish (and his) ambitious (plan to) wrest control of several major oil projects from American and European companies (with a) showdown (ahead for these) coveted energy resources….” The Times went on to claim this action would undermine Venezuela’s growth hinting Big Oil’s threat to leave might get Chavez to back down enough to get them to stay. It never happened as this writer suggested April 12 in an article titled “Wall Street Journal and New York Times Attack journalism.” The article made it clear oil exploration and production in Venezuela is so profitable that even with a smaller share of the profits US, European and other Big Oil investors wouldn’t dream of leaving. Whine plenty, leave, not likely, and now we know they won’t.

AP’s Natalie Obiko Pearson reported April 26 that “Four major oil companies (stopped whining April 25 and) agreed to cede control of Venezuela’s last remaining (majority-owned) privately run oil projects to President Hugo Chavez’s government” with ConocoPhillips coming around May 1 showing it, too, was all bark and no bite. Those agreeing through signed memorandums of understanding were Chevron, BP(Amoco) PLC, France’s Total SA, Norway’s Statoil ASA, ConocoPhillips, and with most antagonistic of all to the idea ExxonMobil finally doing it privately as was almost certain to happen and then did.

AP reported ConocoPhillips has the most Orinoco basin exposure in two of four projects, Ameriven and Petrozuata with a (former) 50.1% stake in the latter. It was inconceivable the company would abandon them, and on May 1 it announced it would stay on. The one remaining issue to be resolved is compensation with foreign investors having until June 26 to negotiate terms for their reduced stakes. Expect more Big Oil whining followed by capitulation again to Venezuelan Energy Ministry’s expected offer of fair and equitable takeover terms.

On April 26, PDVSA’s web site reported a total of 10 foreign oil companies agreed to transfer majority control of their “Oil Belt” operations to the state-run oil company. Further, the company expects to achieve a daily capacity of 5.85 million barrels in 2012 and said its January 1 taking control of 32 oil fields will advance the country “toward full national sovereignty over (its) natural energy reserves.”

In response to these actions, and on the day it took effect, the Journal went on the attack again with more ahead certain to be as false and misleading. Its writers called Chavez a “self-proclaimed Maoist (wanting to) reshape the global oil business by sidelining the US and making China his country’s chief strategic energy partner” for investment and export. The Journal also accused Chavez of using “oil as a political weapon” since taking office in 1999 offering discounted oil “to dozens of Latin American countries” as his weapon of choice plus forging alliances with US “economic rivals like China and political rivals like Iran.”

Hugo Chavez, in fact, is a self-proclaimed social democrat charting his own independent course toward progressive “21st century socialism” along the lines Latin American expert James Petras calls the “pragmatic left” in contrast to the more “radical left” of Colombia’s FARC guerrillas; elements of “teachers and peasant-indigenous movements in Oaxaca, Guerrero and Chiapas in Mexico;” many “small Marxist groups in Argentina, Bolivia, Chile and elsewhere;” and Venezuela’s “peasant and barrio movements,” among others. Other Latin American leaders Petras calls “pragmatic” leftists include Bolivia’s Evo Morales, Cuba’s Castro and many “large electoral parties and major peasant and trade unions in Central and South America” including Mexico’s PRD party, El Salvador’s FMLN, Chile’s Communist Party, “the majority in Peruvian (Ollanta) Humala’s parliamentary party;” and others including “the great majority of left Latin American intellectuals.”

Unlike what the Wall Street Journal and rest of the US corporate media report or imply, Chavez and others on the “pragmatic left” aren’t aiming to destroy capitalism, just tame it. They also plan no wholesale renunciation of accumulated IMF, World Bank and other international lending agency debt, only calling for it to be on more equitable terms; restructuring it to make their nations’ debt burden fair; and aiming to become free from its repressive yoke as Venezuela did paying it off completely with Chavez announcing May 1 his country is pulling out of the IMF and World Bank, formally breaking free from the kind of debt slavery these institutions impose on countries they lend to guaranteeing their people continued impoverishment.

WASHINGTON — The Bush administration is trying to evade responsibility for problems at the Guantanamo Bay prison by falsely blaming defense lawyers for the trouble, the New York City Bar says.

The group’s president leveled the criticism in asking Attorney General Alberto Gonzales to abandon a U.S. Justice Department proposal to limit lawyers’ access to the nearly 400 detainees.

In a court filing this month, the department said attorney access via the mail system has “enabled detainees’ counsel to cause unrest on the base by informing detainees about terrorist attacks.”

The mail system was “misused” to inform detainees about military operations in Iraq, activities of terrorist leaders, efforts in the war on terror, the Hezbollah attack on Israel and abuse at Abu Ghraib prison, the department said in this month’s court filing.

“This is an astonishing and disingenuous assertion,” the association president, Barry M. Kamins, wrote Attorney General Alberto Gonzales.

Kamins said many detainees have been held in solitary confinement for prolonged periods and have lost hope of a fair hearing to demonstrate their innocence.

WASHINGTON (AP) — Lt. Daniel Zimmerman, an infantry platoon leader in Iraq, puts a blog on the Internet every now and then “to basically keep my friends and family up to date” back home.

It just got tougher to do that for Zimmerman and a lot of other U.S. soldiers.

No more using the military’s computer system to socialize and trade videos on MySpace, YouTube and nine other Web sites, the Pentagon says.

Citing security concerns and technological limits, the Pentagon has cut off access to those sites for personnel using the Defense Department’s computer network.

The change limits use of the popular outlets for service members on the front lines, who regularly post videos and journals.

“I put my blog on there and my family reads it,” said Zimmerman, 29, a platoon leader with B Company, 1st Battalion, 28th Infantry Regiment.

“It scares the crap out of them sometimes,” he said.

“I keep it as vague as possible,” he said. “I’m pretty responsible about it. It’s just basically to tell a little bit about my life over here” he said.

He’s regularly at a base where he doesn’t have Defense Department access to the Internet, but he has used it when he goes to bigger bases. He’ll have to rely on a private account all the time now.

Memos about the change went out in February, and it took effect last week. It does not affect the Internet cafes that soldiers in Iraq use that are not connected to the Defense Department’s network.

The cafe sites are run by a private vendor, FUBI (For US By Iraqis).

Also, the ban also does not affect other sites, such as Yahoo, and does not prevent soldiers from sending messages and photos to their families by e-mail.

Internet use has become a troublesome issue for the military as it struggles to balance security concerns with privacy rights. As blogs and video-sharing become more common, the military has voiced increasing concern about service members revealing details about military operations or other information about equipment or procedures that will aid the enemy.

At the same time, service members have used the Web sites to chronicle their time in battle, posting videos and writing journals that provide a powerful, personal glimpse into their days at war.

“These actions were taken to enhance and increase network security and protect the use of the bandwidth,” said Col. Gary Keck, a Pentagon spokesman.

The Pentagon said that use of the video sites in particular was putting a strain on the network, and also opening it to potential viruses or penetration by so-called “phishing” attacks in which scam artists try to steal sensitive data by mimicking legitimate Web sites.

His cravenly pro-US policy on the Middle East misunderstood Bush’s real agenda and resulted in catastrophic failure

Tony Blair’s opposition to an immediate ceasefire in the Lebanon war last summer precipitated his downfall. Now that he has announced the date of his departure from Downing Street, his entire Middle East record needs to be placed under an uncompromising lens.

Blair came to office with no experience of, and virtually no interest in, foreign affairs, and ended by taking this country to war five times. Blair boasts that his foreign policy was guided by the doctrine of liberal interventionism. But the war in Iraq is the antithesis of liberal intervention. It is an illegal, immoral and unnecessary war, a war undertaken on a false prospectus and without sanction from the UN.

Blair’s entire record in the Middle East is one of catastrophic failure. He used to portray Britain as a bridge between the two sides of the Atlantic. By siding with America against Europe on Iraq, however, he helped to destroy the bridge. Preserving the special relationship with America was the be all and end all of Blair’s foreign policy. He presumably supported the Bush administration over Iraq in the hope of exercising influence on its policy. Yet there is no evidence that he exercised influence on any significant policy issue. His support for the neoconservative agenda on Iraq was uncritical and unconditional.

Blair failed to understand that America’s really special relationship is with Israel, not Britain. Every time that George Bush had to choose between Blair and Ariel Sharon, he chose the latter. Blair’s special relationship with Bush was a one-way street: Blair made all the concessions and got nothing tangible in return.

American policy towards the Middle East was doomed to failure from the start, and the end result has been to saddle Britain with a share of the responsibility for this failure. The premise behind American policy was that Iraq was the main issue in Middle East politics and that regime change in Baghdad would weaken the Palestinians and force them to accept a settlement on Israel’s terms. The road to Jerusalem, it was argued, went through Baghdad. This premise was wrong. Iraq was a non-issue; it did not pose a threat to any of its neighbours, and certainly not to America or Britain. The real issue was Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian territories and America’s support for Israel in its savage colonial war against the Palestinian people.

Two elements are necessary to commit the crime of genocide:

1) the mental element, meaning intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, and

2) the physical element, which includes any of the following: killing or causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; deliberately inflicting conditions of life calculated to bring about the group’s physical destruction in whole or in part; imposing measures intended to prevent births; or forcibly transferring children to another group.

Considering that such clear language comes from a UN treaty which is legally binding on our country, things could start getting a little worrisome — especially when you realize that since our government declared economic and military warfare on Iraq we’ve killed well over one million people, fast approaching two.

This summer will be one year since researchers from Johns Hopkins University collected data for a study which concluded 655,000 additional deaths were caused by the military war, and things have only gotten worse since then. Then consider that the economic war killed an additional 500,000 Iraqi kids under the age of five during only the first seven years of sanctions which were in force for a dozen years, according to a 1999 U.N. report.

Based on the Johns Hopkins estimate of Iraqis killed in the war, one could conservatively estimate that another 2.6 million people have been wounded. The U.N. estimates that between 1.5 million and 2 million Iraqis are now “internally displaced” by the fighting and roughly the same number have fled their country, including disproportionate numbers of doctors and other professionals.

If you are sitting down and possess a healthy imagination, try conjuring up similar conditions here in our land. Start with the fact that few people buy bottled water and what comes out of the tap is guaranteed to at least make you sick if not kill you Three times as many of our fellow citizens are out of work as during the Great Depression On a good day we have three or four hours of electricity to preserve food or cool the 110-degree heat No proper hospitals or rehab clinics exist to help the wounded become productive members of society Roads are a mess Reports of birth defects from exposure to depleted uranium have begun surfacing around the country. Reflect for a minute on the grief brought by a single loved one’s death. Then open your heart to the reality of life if we suffered casualties comparable to those endured by the people of Iraq.

In the former cities of Atlanta, Denver, Boston, Seattle, Milwaukee, Fort Worth, Baltimore, San Francisco, Dallas and Philadelphia every single person is dead. In Vermont, Delaware, Hawaii, Idaho, Nebraska, Nevada, Kansas, Mississippi, Iowa, Oregon, South Carolina and Colorado every single person is wounded.

The entire populations of Ohio and New Jersey are homeless, surviving with friends, relatives or under bridges as they can. The entire populations of Michigan, Indiana and Kentucky have fled to Canada or Mexico. Over the past three years, one in four U.S. doctors has left the country. Last year alone 3,000 doctors were kidnapped and 800 killed. In short, nobody “out there” is coming to save us.

We are in hell.

Of course our government didn’t intend to commit genocide, it just sort of happened. The Iraqis kept getting in the way while we were trying to complete the mission. Mistakes were made as we were building democracy, but surely no genocide was intended. After all, we are the international deciders of what is and what isn’t genocide, and we know full well that intent is a requirement.

It was only “collateral genocide” and lord knows we did our very best to avoid it.

Editor’s Comment: Perhaps never before in history has the popular class been so challenged by an illusion of the invincibility of the barbaric state. When the mass media and the state enjoy an alliance for advancing the purpose and direction of the ruling class, ghosts of futility and defeat often visit the consciousness of the people. James Petras’ essay reveals the deepest hopes and abiding power that lives in the “cultural renaissance” now thriving in the face of state’s militarism, mass media control and economic violence. In this essay, we on the left, learn from our mistakes, renew our confidence and reinvest our selves in the mission we share with “the people”. – Les Blough, Editor

“The truth is that the barbaric state is vulnerable, tactically powerful because of money and arms but strategically vulnerable: No institutions, even those that buttress a police state, can stand in the face of a sustained cultural and political resistance that exposes its deceptions, its criminal acts, its corruption and depredations.”

Introduction

We live in a time of imperial-driven destructive wars in the name of ‘democracy’, savage exploitation in the name of ‘emerging world powers’, massive forced population displacement in the name of ‘immigration’ and large-scale pillage of natural resources in the name of ‘free markets’. We live in a time of barbarism and the barbarian elites employ an army of linguistic and cultural manipulators to justify their conquests.

The great crimes against most of humanity are justified by a corrosive debasement of language and thought – a deliberate fabrication of euphemisms, falsehoods and conceptual deceptions. Cultural expressions are a central determinant in class, national, ethnic and gender relations. They reflect and are products of political, economic and social power. But just as power is ultimately a social relation between antagonistic classes, cultural expressions are also mediated through the lenses, experiences and interests of the dominant elites and their rebellious subjects.

Even as the writers of the barbarous elites have fabricated a linguistic world of terror, of demons and saviors, of axes of good and evil, of euphemisms which embellish the crimes against humanity, so have new groups of writers, artists and collective participants come forth to clarify reality and elucidate the existential and collective bases for demystifying the lies and creating a new cultural reality.
In the face of elite barbarism, a cultural renaissance is born. Revelations of crimes are made through journalistic investigations, plays and songs. Affirmations of integrity, social solidarity and individual rejections of the monetary enticements strengthen moral commitment in the face of ever-present threats, assassinations and official censure.

The great crimes of the imperial powers and their local clients include the massacres and daily death counts, propaganda, which pronounces every victim a criminal, and every criminal a savior. The political delinquents have not, do not and cannot silence, deafen or blind a new generation of critical intellectuals, poets and artists who speak truth to the people.

There are several themes which are essential in the advancement of the emerging cultural renaissance and our challenge to the reign of barbarism: These include the politics of language, conceptual misconceptions and intellectual courage in everyday life. The great conflict is between the power of the mass media and collective solidarity, and the false association of class with high and mass culture.

The Politics of Language

The corruption of language is a prescription for complicity in political crimes. Corruption of language takes the form of euphemisms concocted by propagandists, transmitted through the mass media, echoed in the pompous language of academics, judges, and translated into the gutter language of the sensationalist yellow press. Monstrous crimes against rural communities perpetuated by the police state are described as ‘pacification’; reduction of salaries and social services are described as ‘stabilization’; and the elimination of labor legislation protecting employment from arbitrary firings and weakening of trade unions is described as ‘labor flexibilization’.

Human rights advocates defending victims of military violence are called ‘accomplices of terrorists’; systematic state and paramilitary violence is called national security; opposition to military and political linkages to death squads is called terrorism; large scale counter-insurgency plans designed and funded by foreign imperial powers are labeled measures for ‘national salvation’.

There is also the pretext of providing a pseudo-scientific neutral terminology to inhuman acts – destroying thousands of communities and displacing millions is described as ‘liquidating subversive elements’ and likened to the extermination of noxious insects.

Euphemisms are a form of collective anesthesia – to tranquilize the population not directly affected by state violence. The imagery evoked by euphemisms is always portrayed as benign to obscure the malignant reality. To ‘pacify’ suggests a ‘pacifier’ and allows a parent to gently calm an infant and eliminate its irritable cries. ‘Pacification’ of a people means the opposite: the violent eruption of military forces into a tranquil community that causes screams of pain and shudders of death.

Stabilization in the mouths of state authorities means to reduce trade and budget deficits by lowering wages and salaries while retaining subsidies and tax-exemptions for the ruling class. Stabilization for big business and the banks means de-stabilization for the working class and the poor: the loss of health services, increases in the prices of basic commodities like food and transportation and the loss of employment leading to family break-ups, children leaving school, single parent homes and rising rates of suicide and alcoholism.

The dress rehearsal for any political and social transformation is linguistic clarity – speaking and writing in a language in which words and concepts evoke the reality we live, especially the differential class impact of specific policies. The unmasking of euphemisms is not a job for linguists but for all committed intellectuals and artists.

Language and the Left

Too many times the left fails to elucidate the meaning of euphemisms – resorting to the lazy device of hanging quotation marks around the targeted phrase. The quotation marks are meant to indicate irony and criticism or rejection of the euphemism – but they are just as obscurantist as the euphemism they seek to discredit. For example, many writers deal with authoritarian or police state regimes which claim to be democratic by simply putting quotes around ‘democracy’ – as if the quotes are self-explanatory. The critics fail to take the time and make the effort to elaborate a more precise term, which captures the cognitive meaning of the political system. The resort to quotation marks has a long tradition of abuse on the left, an abuse that serves to undermine the pedagogical purposes of educating the popular classes and providing a new and useful political vocabulary.

More recently, especially among intellectuals who have a pretence of communicating or leading the working class and peasantry, they abuse popular understanding by swearing. When using ‘swear words’ intellectuals abdicate their responsibility to widen the vocabulary of the working class or peasant activists. When workers or peasants resort to swear words, much depends on the context and tonality to determine meaning. The same swear word can be a denunciation or a term of affection, depending on the context. But when there is a political vocabulary that is more precise and varied, the pseudo-populist intellectual should introduce and define its meaning instead of pretending to establish rapport on the basis of the most limited and simplistic level of communication: vulgarity.

The intellectual playing down to the workers and peasants doesn’t raise their understanding; instead it reduces the literacy of the intellectual.

Go to Google News search and type in the following: “FISA Modernization Act.” It will return 10 meager results, only but one offered by the corporate media. Of course, you should not be surprised.

Bush and the neocons want to deep six FISA, itself a violation of the Fourth Amendment, not that it matters as the Fourth died an ignoble death some time ago. But even FISA is not acceptable to the authoritarian psychopaths running the government. Even as “the administration asks Congress to expand its leeway under the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, the White House continues to insist on the president’s inherent power to disregard even his preferred version of that law. No wonder J. Michael McConnell, the director of national intelligence, received a skeptical reception from Democrats on the Senate Intelligence Committee when he testified last week in favor of ‘modernizing’ FISA,” the Los Angeles Times reports.

It figures, as well, that a Los Angeles Times op-ed didn’t really find McConnell’s suggestions abhorrent. “But some of what McConnell requested makes sense. The threat of domestic terrorist attack does require greater flexibility, as do changes in technology. FISA was enacted at a time when most international communications traveled by radio or satellite and thus were outside the law’s regulation of wire transmissions; today, those same communications move along fiber-optic cables. Likewise, a court order should not be required just because a phone call or e-mail from one foreign location to another happens to pass through the United States.”

Of course, “modernizing” FISA has nothing to do with a “domestic terrorist attack.” It has to do with surveilling the public at large.

Now for the shell game. It appears there are two versions of this bill—a secret one and yet another sanitized version for public consumption. “The ‘unclassified’ version of this legislation was released only after numerous protests by several organizations with which we work in coalition,” notes Downsize DC. “Our coalition partners have been invited to make ’statements’ about this ‘unclassified’ version but have not been afforded an opportunity to rebut the secret testimony of the Bush administration. How could they, it’s secret.”

In regard to the details:

All we know is that the bill deals with what the Executive Branch can and cannot do with regard to spying—particularly on the American people. And we’re a lot less sure about the “cannot” part than we are about the “can” aspects of this. In other words, this bill may legalize widespread spying on Americans by the President of the United States.

Did you think the Democrats were going to protect you against the lawless Bush administration? You should have heard Intelligence Committee Chairman, Senator Jay Rockefeller, at the “public” portion of their hearings. He didn’t seem resolved to hold the administration accountable for its past civil liberties violations. His was a voice of bi-partisan reconciliation with government lawlessness.

And why not? The Democrats like power too. Perhaps they like the fact that if they give more power to Bush now, they’ll get to use that power too when they get their turn at the wheel, which they expect to happen soon.

The code name for this bill seems to be the “FISA Modernization Act.” The old, supposedly primitive, version of the FISA law at least provided some tissue-thin protections against government spying on innocent Americans. We would prefer NOT to have those protections “modernized” out of existence, thank you very much.

Democrat Bill Nelson of Florida almost reached the promised land, but not quite: “The trick is, we want to go after the bad guys. We want to get the information that we need, but we’re a nation of laws and we want to prevent the buildup of a dictator who takes the law into his own hands, saying I don’t like that. So now we have to find the balance.”

Bill, the balance is in the Fourth Amendment: “The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.”

BAGHDAD, 10 May 2007 (IRIN) – Eleven-year-old Seif Abdul-Rafiz and his two brothers were left with no choice but to leave school and work so as to help their unemployed parents make ends meet.

Unable to find a job, Seif resorted to making bombs for Sunni insurgents who are fighting US troops in Iraq.

“We work about eight hours a day and are supervised by two men. They give us food and at the end of the day we get paid for our work. Sometimes we get US $7 and sometimes we get $10, depending on how many bombs we make,” Abdul-Rafiz said.

“The bombs are used to fight American soldiers. I was really afraid in the beginning but then my parents told me that it was for two good causes: the first is to help our family eat; and the second is to fight occupation forces,” he added.

Thousands of poor children in Iraq are forced to work to help their families. Many of them work in one way or another for a variety of armed groups that operate in the war-torncountry.

“If I had choice, I would have preferred to be in a classroom but we need to eat. In the beginning, they were very kind with us but later they started to threaten us, saying that if we leave our work they would kill our family,” Abdul-Rafiz said.

According to NGO the Iraq Aid Association (IAA), reports from Anbar province and two mainly Sunni neighbourhoods of the capital show that children from poor families are helping insurgents make bombs.

“They are in direct contact with dangerous chemicals which when wrongly handled can result in their death. We have secure information that at least three children have died making bombs,” Fatah Ahmed, IAA spokesman, said.

But Abdul-Rafiz said that hunger was worse than anything.

Foreign investment and Shiite control are the primary concerns. A White House deadline for passage is in doubt.

BAGHDAD — It has not even reached parliament, but the oil law that U.S. officials call vital to ending Iraq’s civil war is in serious trouble among Iraqi lawmakers, many of whom see it as a sloppy document rushed forward to satisfy Washington’s clock.

Opposition ranges from vehement to measured, but two things are clear: The May deadline that the White House had been banking on is in doubt. And even if the law is passed, it fails to resolve key issues, including how to divide Iraq’s oil revenue among its Shiite, Kurdish and Sunni regions, and how much foreign investment to allow. Those questions would be put off for future debates.

The problems of the oil bill bode poorly for the other so-called benchmarks that the Bush administration has been pressuring Prime Minister Nouri Maliki’s government to meet. Those include provincial elections, reversing a prohibition against former Baath Party members holding government and military positions and revision of Iraq’s constitution.

Republican leaders in Washington have warned administration officials that if the Iraqi government fails to meet those benchmarks by the end of the summer, remaining congressional support for Bush’s Iraq policies could crumble. Their impatience was underscored Wednesday by Vice President Dick Cheney during a visit here.

“I did make it clear that we believe it’s very important to move on the issues before us in a timely fashion, and that any undue delay would be difficult to explain,” Cheney told reporters.

But Iraqi lawmakers show little sign of bending to accommodate Bush on an issue as crucial as oil.

“We have two clocks — the Baghdad clock and the Washington clock — and this is a perfect example,” said Mahmoud Othman, a lawmaker from the semiautonomous Kurdish region of northern Iraq. “This has always been the case. Washington has been pushing the Iraqis to do things to fit their agenda.”

Iraq is believed to have some of the world’s largest oil reserves, about 115 billion barrels. The country’s 2007 budget is based on predictions that oil proceeds will reach $31 billion, 93% of the government’s revenue.

But war and political instability have kept production down. Just before the U.S.-led invasion in March 2003, production was 2.6 million barrels per day. U.S. officials predicted a rapid rise to 3 million barrels. Instead, Iraq often has struggled to push the daily total to 2 million barrels because of obsolete equipment and security problems.

The oil law is supposed to change this by opening the industry to foreign investors who could modernize equipment and increase production. U.S. officials hope that spreading oil profit fairly across the country would cause instability to ebb.

Iraq’s cabinet, the Council of Ministers, approved a draft oil measure in February. From there, it was to go to parliament. U.S. officials predicted passage would be quick, but it has stalled.

The USG Open Source Center paraphrases reports in the Jordanian press on US Vice President Dick Cheney’s current round of diplomacy in the Middle East.

Jordanian Dailies Comment on Cheney’s Middle East Tour, Objectives
Jordan — OSC Summary
Friday, May 11, 2007

Jordanian newspapers published on 10 May are observed to carry the following commentaries on the recent tour by US Vice President Dick Cheney to the Middle East, particularly to Iraq.

BAGHDAD (AP) — Iraq’s parliament objected Saturday to the construction of walls around Baghdad neighborhoods and called on Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki to testify about other security issues.

Construction of the walls — particularly in the Baghdad neighborhood of Azamiyah — has been criticized by residents and Sunni clerics who say it is a form of sectarian discrimination. Even followers of radical Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr complained, fearing their strongholds in the capital will soon be split by the barriers.

U.S. and Iraqi officials have defended the construction of the barriers, which began last month, as a temporary measure to protect the neighborhood during the 12-week-old security crackdown in Baghdad. When the wall is finished, Azamiyah will be gated and checkpoints manned by Iraqi soldiers will be the only entries, the U.S. military said, stressing that the decision was made in coordination with the Iraqis.

Parliament took up the issue Saturday in a raucous session that included debate on the continuing U.S. military presence in Iraq, security raids and human rights abuses. Lawmakers interrupted each other and speaker Mahmoud al-Mashhdani struggled to maintain order.

“They (security walls) don’t protect residents because these areas are shelled by mortars and Katyusha rockets. … Will they build roofs too?” said Kurdish lawmaker Mahmoud Othman. “We must build bridges between the different groups, not build walls to separate them.”

The resolution, voted on by a show of hands, passed 138-to-88 in the 275-member house. The president and his two deputies must unanimously approve the legislation for it to become law, or else it will be sent back to the house for re-examination.
Last month, al-Maliki, a Shiite, said he had ordered a halt to the construction in Azamiyah, but his aides later said he was responding to exaggerated media reports and that construction would continue.

The house was about to vote on another resolution, this time to ban American forces from Baghdad, when officials announced the house no longer had a quorum.

The house also decided to summon al-Maliki and the defense and interior ministers to address other security issues, particularly in Diyala province northeast of Baghdad where there has been a spike in attacks against U.S. and Iraqi forces.