Endgame for Iraqi Oil? - by Jack Miles and Tom EngelhardtBefore the invasion of Iraq, while millions demonstrated in the streets, often waving homemade placards with "No Blood for Oil" – or equivalents like "Don't Trade Lives for Oil" and like "How Did USA's Oil Get Under Iraq's Sand?" – the Bush administration said remarkably little about the vast quantities of petroleum on which Saddam Hussein's regime was perched. The President did, however, speak reverently about preserving not Iraq's "energy reserves" but its "patrimony," as he so euphemistically put it. The American mainstream media followed suit, dismissing arguments about the significance of Iraqi and Middle Eastern oil as the refuge of, if not scoundrels, then at least truly simpleminded dissidents who knew not whereof they spoke. Generally, in our news pages and on the TV news, with Iraq at the edge of a shock-and-awe invasion, Iraqi energy reserves were dealt with as if no more than a passing thought, as if the Middle East's main export was hummus.
Video: Israeli soldiers fire tear gas at 6-year-old children on their way to school The new school year started four days ago in the occupied West Bank, and Israeli soldiers have fired tear gas and hurled stun grenades at Palestinian elementary school students on at least two occasions already. In the Nablus -area village of Burin , which is surrounded by illegal Jewish-only Israeli settlements , Israeli forces stormed an elementary school Wednesday, firing tear gas and stun grenades at students after a settler’s vehicle traveling nearby the school was allegedly hit with a rock thrown by a Palestinian youth. Many children were treated at the scene for tear-gas inhalation, reported Ma’an News Agency . One day earlier, Israeli forces in Hebron fired up to 15 tear gas canisters and five stun grenades at small children as they made their way to school Tuesday morning. Video of the attack — recorded and posted to YouTube by the International Solidarity Movement (ISM)...
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