Well-Made World 18

Hi again. Thought that, come August, we had gone the way of the US Congress or its Iraqi counterpart? You were wrong. We are back.

Over the past 40 years, Regis Debray has made it from languishing in Bolivian jail--after being one of the last people to see Che Guevara alive--to being one of the most respected and sought-after political analysts in Europe. We've returned with Debray and this piece on Palestine, commissioned last winter by then-outgoing French president Jacques Chirac, and published in the August 2007 edition of Le Monde Diplomatique. Debray's report reads as somewhat dated--it was handed in to the French government in January, and therefore cannot cover even the most obvious and directly important events that have transpired since then, such as the Hamas putsch in Gaza and the subsequent illegal Fatah coup. What Debray finds is far more damning than a simple gap between intent and action on the part of Israel or the "international community." Rather, what he sees at work is a fundamental break between the lip service paid to the "peace process" or a putative "Palestinian state," and the creation of facts on the ground--Israel's favored "strategy" since the pre-state Yishuv--that are destroying what slight chances remain for even an "imperfect peace."

The Guardian's Jonathan Steele writes that, unfortunately for Dick Cheney and his friends in the US oil lobby, Iraqi legislators did not pass the oil law that Washington has been trying to ram through the Iraqi parliament before it began its much-debated August recess. This could be due to the simple fact that, to the chagrin of Cheney et al, the Iraqi lawmakers have actually decided to carefully read the legislation, which would greatly destabilize Iraqi sovereignty over the country's oil reserves if passed in its present form.