E Pluribus Unum

(No, not Al Gore, geez, calm down already.)

Soon, very soon indeed, Ahmed Chalabi will be able to declare victory and send us home. He's "fixing" Baghdad just like he fixed the intel that got us in there to begin with. Already he's managed to get Sadr's militia to go to ground.

As I mentioned before, Iraqi oil minister Chalabi, the man conveniently in the middle mediating the Baghdad crack down, is now ready to dictate terms to everyone in the region, Iran, Syria, Turkey, Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States, and of course us (or rather the American based multinational corporate energy cartel).

Finally we're getting a diplomatic surge thanks to the Iraqis passing the Neo-Con Pinata known as the oil "law," -- which is designed to open up those fields Cheney's Energy Task Force was carving up on the map of Iraq instead of convening the Anti-Terrorism Fask Force before 9/11.

Funny how that worked out. They pass "our oil law," and now we're willing to break bread with Syria and Iran.

Confused? Don't worry, so is Condi. You can name an oil tanker after her, but you can't explain that this is all a feature, not a bug of your Neo-Con Utopia.

Via Iraq Today, through a convoluted chain of links to a Counterpunch article, we glean this fairly coherent assessment of the British withdrawal.

"...But long before then almost all the remaining British forces will be located at Basra air base and act in support of Iraqi military and police units..." the articles continues "...As a result, southern Iraq has, in effect, long been under the control of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI) and the so-called "Sadrist" factions...The Iraqi forces that Britain helped create in the area were little more than an extension of Shia Islamist control by other means."

What is left unsaid, but interpreted nicely by An Arab Woman Blues is that the man she calls "crook, embezzler, CIA/Mossad Iranian agent, Chalabi," and his allies in the Maliki Government -- along with their associated Iranian-backed militias who acted as his body guards when he made his MacArtur-esque return to Basra -- have effectively consolodated their control of the southern Iraq and will have Chalabi's back as he takes the dealer's chair at the greatest poker game of the century.

Chalabi holds all the cards and he's ready to deal. The table stakes are in the hundreds of billions, and the pot includes franchise rights to the most valuable natural resource sell-off in generations.

And you thought Dick Cheney and his merry little band of conspirators didn't know what they were doing. The continued chaos is no longer useful as leverage to get the factionalized Iraqi Parliament to approve privatization of Iraq's greatest treasure -- so just watch as it magically ends once the folks in the Carlyle Group get their piece of the pie.