The retreat from Basra By Patrick Cockburn Published: 22 February 2007

It is an admission of defeat. Iraq is turning into one of the world's bloodiest battlefields in which nobody is safe. Blind to this reality, Tony Blair said yesterday that Britain could safely cut its forces in Iraq because the apparatus of the Iraqi government is growing stronger.

In fact the civil war is getting worse by the day. Food is short in parts of the country. A quarter of the population would starve without government rations. Many Iraqis are ill because their only drinking water comes from the highly polluted Tigris and Euphrates rivers.

Nowhere in Mr Blair's statement was any admission of regret for reducing Iraq to a wasteland from which 2 million people have fled and 1.5 million are displaced internally.

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Gus: may I congratulate the pommy weasel for reducing the influence of his country in the cock up that Iraq was... Of course he should have realised before going to war that it was going to be a cock up but unlike our Rodent Rattus and the US zealot warmonger, he has the courage of his own confusion... Troops out... soon, not yet... but time table announced...

From the Washington Post

Ally's Timing Is Awkward for Bush

By Jonathan Weisman and Peter Baker
Washington Post Staff Writers
Thursday, February 22, 2007; Page A12

As the British announced the beginning of their departure from Iraq yesterday, President Bush's top foreign policy aide proclaimed it "basically a good-news story." Yet for an already besieged White House, the decision was doing a good job masquerading as a bad-news story.

What national security adviser Stephen J. Hadley meant was that the British believe they have made enough progress in southern Iraq to turn over more of their sector to Iraqi forces. To many back in Washington, though, what resonated was that Bush's main partner in Iraq is starting to get out just as the president is sending in more U.S. troops.

‘The final draft of Iraq's controversial hydrocarbons law has been submitted to the Iraqi Cabinet ahead of its presentation to Parliament for ratification next month.

Iraqi officials have attempted to defuse the backlash caused by last month's revelation in The Independent on Sunday that the law would grant foreign oil companies a large slice of the country's oil reserves.

The final draft has quietly dropped the term "production-sharing contracts" used in earlier drafts. These contracts involve energy companies paying for the initial investment in an oil field but reaping bigger returns if their gamble pays off.

The proposed introduction of production-sharing agreements in Iraq is controversial because they are usually used in challenging regions where oil is difficult and expensive to access, such as the Amazon. By contrast, much of Iraq's 112 billion barrels of proven oil reserves - the second-largest in the world - has already been discovered and is cheap to drill.

But the draft, seen exclusively by The Independent on Sunday, still proposes handing over exploration and production contracts for up to 32 years - far longer than most deals between companies and governments.’

Oil Bonanza Stays In Western Sights After Cosmetic Change To Iraqi Deals