The first public hearings at the long-awaited inquiry into the Iraq war will take place next month, the panel's chairman has announced.
They
will begin on 24 November at the Queen Elizabeth II conference centre
in central London, close to parliament, Sir John Chilcot said.
WASHINGTON - Oil tycoon T. Boone Pickens
told Congress on Wednesday that U.S. energy companies are
"entitled" to some of Iraq's crude because of the large number
of American troops that lost their lives fighting in the
country and the U.S. taxpayer money spent in Iraq.
Boone, speaking to the newly formed Congressional Natural
Gas Caucus, complained that the Iraqi government has awarded
contracts to foreign companies, particularly Chinese firms, to
develop Iraq's vast reserves while American companies have
mostly been shut out.
Iraq's cabinet has approved a deal with BP to develop the huge Rumaila oil field in the country's first international energy deal since the American-led invasion in 2003.
The agreement, which was brokered in June during the first round of tendering for licences to exploit Iraq's enormous and largely untapped hydrocarbon resources, should also send "a strong signal" to other energy groups that the Iraqi administration is keen to secure deals.
I am free. But my country is still
a prisoner of war. There has been a lot of talk about the action and
about the person who took it, and about the hero and the heroic act,
and the symbol and the symbolic act. But, simply, I answer: what compelled me to act is the injustice that befell my people, and how the occupation wanted to humiliate my homeland by putting it under its boot.
"On my last
day in Iraq," veteran McClatchy News correspondent Leila Fadel wrote
August 9, "as on my first day in Iraq, I couldn't see what the United
States and its allies had accomplished. ... I couldn't understand what
thousands of American soldiers had died for and why hundreds of
thousands of Iraqis had been killed."
Decades ago, while a callow young reporter, I noted favorably that "the
late, great Senator George Aiken" had once famously and wisely offered a
solution to America's Vietnam quagmire: "Declare victory and go home."
Vice President Biden dusted off a pair of Bush administration
pom-poms and trotted out its best cheer for war last week: continued
military effort and occupation in Afghanistan, he told the BBC, are in
the U.S. and U.K.'s best interests as they're the only way to prevent
another terrorist attack like Sept. 11. "It is worth the effort we are
making," Biden said, as terror groups could "wreak havoc" on Europe and
the US, and both countries must endure more "sacrifice."
American troops were not welcomed with flowers in Iraq but their departure from cities and towns has been.
Iraqis
celebrated National Sovereignty Day Tuesday as U.S. troops were yanked
out of populated centres and put into remote bases.
In time,
even that hidden presence will begin to grate on the Iraqis, just as a
U.S. military base in Saudi Arabia had spurred Osama bin Laden and
others.
The strategic communications
specialist advising a financial industry effort to enhance Wall
Street's image has plenty of experience in spinning the American
public: In the Bush White House, he was one of the aides in charge of
the administration's fact-bending campaign to sell the Iraq War.
However one frames the debate, it is apparent to any fair minded and
rational person that the invasion of Iraq, based as it was on
misinformation at best, lies and deceptions at worst, was a mistake
and should never have occurred. Certainly President Obama has made
this claim on numerous occasions as well as many who had previously
supported (and voted for) the war. After having acknowledged this
fact, however, President Obama and others would have us forget the
past as it serves, in their view, no practical purpose to rehash and
moralize over things that cannot be undone.
