Oil is slippery stuff but not as slippery as the figures being peddled by Iraq’s U.S. occupiers. Up around Kirkuk, the authorities are keeping the sabotage figures secret — because they can’t stop their pipelines to Turkey from blowing up. Down in Baghdad, where the men who produce Iraq’s oil production figures are beginning to look like the occupants of Plato’s cave — drawing conclusions from shadows on their wall — the statistics are being cooked.

L. Paul Bremer, the U.S. administrator here, is “sexing up” the figures to a point where even the oilmen are shaking their heads. Take Kirkuk. Only when the television cameras capture a blown pipe, flames billowing from its wounds, do the occupation powers report sabotage. Continue reading…

by Phyllis Bennis
Institute for Policy Studies

So What Should Be Done?

1) We should oppose any new UN resolution aimed at providing more legitimacy for the U.S.-UK occupation of Iraq. The UN should not endorse, and countries should not send troops or funds, to maintain or strengthen or “internationalize” Washington’s occupation. We should demand that the UN return to its earlier position in which for 8 ½ months the Council stood defiant of the Bush administration to defend its Charter mandate to “prevent the scourge of war.” That period, in which the UN was part of the international mobilization for peace, represented the global organization’s most “relevant” and most democratic moment. Continue reading…