Well-Made World 13

EUROPE

• No Empires to Albania: Uh, what the fuck?
• Tony Blair, apparently thirsting for (positive) relevance, has lashed out against political reporting in the British media--and by the Independent in particular--for undermining Britons' confidence in their country and their government. Simon Kelner, editor of the Independent, responds, feeling honored at his paper's having been singled out, and even sees Blair's attack as confirming the veracity of the Independent's anti-Iraq war stance.

NEAR EAST

• Flailing around for bedfellows among an Iraqi population it has done everything under the sun to fragment and destroy, the US is giving arms support to Sunni groups for the purpose of fighting their former Shiite allies, who are now accused of representing Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia.
• Kevin Zeese picks up where Dennis Kucinich left off on the floor of Congress a week or so back, and updates us on the state of the Iraqi "hydrocarbon law," a privitization law that the United States is desperately clinging to as the "benchmark" by which the puppet government must prove itself. Iraqi oil laborers are on strike and are under constant threat from the Iraqi Army and the Maliki government for "sabotaging the [Iraqi] economy."
• Meanwhile, the Iraqi Parliament has recently passed a resolution calling for an end to the American occupation. Today's New York Times, furthermore reports a closed-door meeting between William Fallon, head of CENTCOM, and Nuri al-Maliki, during which Fallon stresses the need for "public progress" on security in Iraq, and where does the pressure start? With the oil distribution law.
• Loose sends us this piece by Patrick Seale, which reminds us that, in recent weeks, George Bush and Robert Gates have stated that the US aim is an "enduring presence" in Iraq--they cite the post-WWII South Korean and Japanese models, though we all know Bush has never read anything resembling a history book in his life--and also that, of the 110 bases built by the US following the invasion, 14 of these are slated to become permanent bases (including the 100-acre compound on the banks of the Tigris--see Well-Made World 6).
  
  LATIN AMERICA

• Richard Gott, the preeminent journalist of Latin America, writes on Hugo Chavez's recent refusal to renew the charter of RCTV, producers of "colonial" television and proponents of the short-lived, CIA-backed coup against Chavez in 2002. See The Revolution Will Not Be Televised, dir. Kim Bartley & Donnacha O'Briain.

U.S.

• In yet more distressing news for academic freedom in America, Norman Finkelstein has been denied tenure in the political science department at DePaul university in Chicago, even after his departmental colleagues voted 9-3 in favor of tenure. This would usually be the place for some No Empires-style vitriol directed against Alan Fucking Dershowitz, who wielded massive outside pressure against Finkelstein, but we're too disgusted to continue.