RTWT

Doesn't matter what your view of the war in Iraq is, you should still read this - Michael Yon's latest dispatch. (Warning: graphic photos)

Dead-tree press is dead

Michael Yon has written another post about Iraq, of a quality and detail that you will never get from the MSM. This time he's on patrol with the Queen's Royal Lancers when they are caught up in an IED attack, and it's a gripping tale he has to tell. He also makes some interesting points about the lack of armour for British forces, and asks whether this is necessarily a bad thing. EU Referendum has written at length about this issue so it's good to have a different perspective.

Order 39 again?

I chanced across a thread at Tim Worstall's just now. It was something to do with an article John Pilger wrote about Iraq and oil. Tim seems to have come off rather the worse of it, and frankly I haven't the inclination to read the whole thing. However one thing Pilger wrote did grab my attention:

Under a law written by American and British officials, the Iraqi puppet regime is about to hand over the extraction of the largest concentration of oil on earth to Anglo-American companies.

Firstly, isn't there an Iraqi government now? Don't they write the laws? Or can the occupying armies still write laws if they like?

If not, then is this handover happening under a law written before the Iraqi government was put in place? Like Order 39, the decree made by Paul Bremer, which Michael Meacher misrepresented as requiring wholesale privatisation of the oil, the factories and the mines to benefit rapacious western capitalists? (It turned out that Order 39 related to Foreign Direct Investment rather than privatisation, and specifically excluded the extractive industries). 

Just asking. 

Michael Yon praises British Troops

There's a fascinating posting here by Michael Yon, the American blogger who is embedded with troops in Iraq. He has managed to get himself embedded with British forces in Basra and gives a gripping account of one of their combat operations. He is very diplomatic about their levels of equipment and lack of air support, and is suitably impressed by the courage they display in attacking Sadr forces despite this.