Baithak World Jun 24: Eric Margolis, Connie Bruck, News & Views, Cartoon, RealNews

PARIS - After a sea of lies and a tsunami of propaganda, the ugly truth behind the Iraq and Afghanistan wars finally emerged into full view this week. Four major western oil companies, Exxon, Mobil, Shell, BP and Total, are about to sign US-brokered no-bid contracts with the US-installed Baghdad regime to begin exploiting Iraq’s oil fields. Saddam Hussein had kicked these firms out three decades ago when he nationalized Iraq’s foreign-owned oil industry for the benefit of Iraq’s national development. The Baghdad regime is turning back the clock. This agreement comes as talks are continuing between the Washington and its Baghdad client regime over future US basing rights in Iraq. After some face-saving Iraqi objections, it is expected that Baghdad will sign a compact with Washington giving US forces control of Iraq and its air space in a manner very similar to Great Britain’s colonial arrangement with Iraq. Interestingly, the same oil companies that used to exploit Iraq when it was a British colony are now returning. As former US Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan recently admitted, the Iraq war was all about oil. VP Dick Cheney stated in 2003 that the invasion of Iraq was about oil, and for the sake of Israel. Eric Margolis


Last October, Sheldon Adelson, the gaming multibillionaire, accompanied a group of Republican donors to the White House to meet with George W. Bush. They wanted to talk to the President about Israel. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was organizing a major conference in the United States, in an effort to re-start the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, and her initiative had provoked consternation among many rightward-leaning American Jews and their Christian evangelical allies. Most had seen Bush as a reliable friend of Israel, and one who had not pressured Israel to pursue the peace process. Adelson, who is seventy-four, owns two of Las Vegas’s giant casino resorts, the Venetian and the Palazzo, and is the third-richest person in the United States, according to Forbes. He is fiercely opposed to a two-state solution; and he had contributed so generously to Bush’s reëlection campaign that he qualified as a Bush Pioneer. A short, rotund man, with sparse reddish hair and a pale countenance that colors when he is angered, Adelson protested to Bush that Rice was thinking of her legacy, not the President’s, and that she would ruin him if she continued to pursue this disastrous course. Then, as Adelson later told an acquaintance, Bush put one arm around his shoulder and another around that of his wife, Miriam, who was born in Israel, and said to her, “You tell your Prime Minister that I need to know what’s right for your people—because at the end of the day it’s going to be my policy, not Condi’s. But I can’t be more Catholic than the Pope.” (The White House denies this account.) The Brass Ring By Connie Bruck


News & Views

Amy Goodman: Retired General: "The Current Administration Has Committed War Crimes"

George Carlin, American Radical

People of Haditha: "This is an Organized Crime"

Inside Bush's Billion-Dollar Immigration Gulag

How a Shady Citigroup Subsidiary Secretly Makes Billions in the Oil Market

George Carlin mourned as counterculture hero

Dilip Hiro: There was no meeting of minds at the oil summit in Jeddah
Sarkozy To Israel: Share Jerusalem Or Else
Detention offers students new outlook on Israel
Carine Fabius: The Story the Media Forgot
China destroys mosque for not backing Games
George Carlin: Seven words that shook a nation
Cricketer Glenn McGrath Mourns Wife Jane McGrath
Alice Munro - Deep-Holes

Doonesbury@SLATE

Paul Jay presents RealNews
WHO'S TO BLAME FOR PRICE OF OIL?
Antonia Juhasz: Unregulated and criminal speculation main cause of high oil prices
http://therealnews.com/c.php?c=080623&i=1760

JUSTICE DEPARTMENT WANTS TO REWRITE GITMO EVIDENCE
US government says it needs to change evidence against detainees before civilian court trials
http://therealnews.com/c.php?c=080623&i=1757