Summaries here and here and here.

Iraq’s parliament chose a new election commission on Saturday in what U.S. officials called a significant step towards holding provincial elections, one of the political benchmarks Washington has set for Baghdad.

The nine commissioners were chosen in a closed session of parliament and their names initially withheld until security was organised for them. As with other members of the government and parliament they will likely be targets for assassination amid spiralling sectarian violence. Article

Spotty and early report, but noted:

British diplomats are checking secret reports that elements within Iran, normally hostile to the West, helped the American secret services to capture Abdul Hadi al-Iraqi, the Kurdish-born senior al-Qaeda militant who was revealed last week to have been arrested on the border between Iran and Iraq late last year.

[snip]

…senior US intelligence officials told The Observer that the Iranian government has ‘in some cases’ been helpful in tracking and ‘disabling’ key militants crossing their national territory between Iraq and Afghanistan. The key Egyptian militant Saif al-Adel, once in charge of training al-Qaeda’s new recruits, and one of Osama bin Laden’s sons are both believed to be under some kind of detention in Iran. Article

The backroom arm-twisting must be beyond imagining.

Northern Iraq’s semi-autonomous Kurdish government Friday said Iraq’s federal government was overstepping its powers by trying to give too much authority to a new national energy company which would control nearly all Iraq’s oil under plans being considered.

Kurdish Oil Minister Ashti Hawrami, in a statement, said Baghdad was attempting to give a new Iraqi national oil company almost 93% of the country’s proven petroleum reserves, among the biggest in the world.

“If an unaccountable and inefficient Iraqi national oil company is created with such a stranglehold on Iraq’s oil, all the peoples of Iraq will suffer,” Hawrami said.

The sharp words underscore how far apart Baghdad and the Kurdish government remain in trying to finalize Iraq’s much-delayed hydrocarbons law necessary for setting the legal framework for attracting foreign investment. All Iraq’s main groups hope to have a final deal submitted to Iraq’s parliament for a vote in May. [Again, a deadline coincident with the oil/energy summit scheduled for the end of May. (see last item in Apr. 18 Iraq IIO section. — voxd] Article

Overview du jour:

The war persists despite the opposition of a majority of Americans and Iraqis.

The war persists despite warnings from U.S. generals that the stress is breaking the Army.

The war persists despite its enormous cost in red ink and dependence on foreign loans.

The war persists despite its total failure.

The war persists despite the known fact that it was based on Bush administration lies and deception.

[snip]

Bush’s invasion of Iraq had no justification. Continuing the war has no positive effects. Each day that the war continues produces more pointless casualties, more red ink and dependence on foreign creditors, more trauma and more hatreds.

The Bush administration is continuing the war without a realizable or defensible goal. Although the Iraqi government is supposedly a democratically elected majority Shiite government, in reality it is a puppet creature of the U.S. occupation without real power and without public support. The “Iraqi government” exists only within the heavily fortified and U.S.-guarded “green zone” in Baghdad.…

As a colony or protectorate, Iraq is too costly to maintain. The United States has already incurred out-of-pocket and future costs of $1 trillion or more. The total gains from oil exploitation and military-security complex profits do not approach this massive figure imposed on U.S. taxpayers, which is growing by the day.

[snip]

The risks of Bush’s war both to Iraqis and Americans is out of proportion to any conceivable gains. The war is all cost and no benefit. Iraqis have been made massively insecure, and their country has undergone tremendous destruction and been turned into a training ground for terrorists.

[snip]

Bush has shown the world that the only difference between American dictatorship and other dictatorships is that, for now, Americans are permitted to remove their dictator after his term is served. Article

The schmucks are going to overplay their hand and make a circus of it. Don’t, don’t, don’t take that step off the higher road.

Democrats plan to highlight the unprecedented rebuke they are delivering to Bush when they send their bill to him on Tuesday. That day is the fourth anniversary of Bush’s speech aboard an aircraft carrier declaring the end to major combat operations in Iraq. To remind Americans of the anniversary, antiwar groups are running television ads showing footage of Bush aboard the carrier that had been decorated with a “Mission Accomplished” banner. Article

Not that it is not, in its way, commendable, but it does strike one as making a quart of lemonade from a kiloton of lemons.

…a group of Iraqi artists - Sunnis, Shiites, Kurds and others - have come together to beautify a stretch of the bleak, grey blast barriers on central Baghdad’s Saadoun Street erected to protect the area from car bombings and other attacks.

[snip]

“We want at least to beautify these walls as long as we can’t move them, but we are afraid that some walls can’t be beautified anymore as they make very hurtful impressions on the souls of Iraqis like the Azamiyah one,” he said.

“That one is not like these, which are just for a building that needs to be protected from attacks,” he said. “The Azamiyah one … tries to divide Iraqis by their sects and religious backgrounds, something have rejected all these past years. And that, I feel … even the most famous painters in this world can’t beautify.”

Iraqis have often painted the concrete barriers that have become a fact of life in the capital and elsewhere in the country since the U.S.-led invasion in 2003, but rarely made a project of it. One of the most high-profile efforts was the painting of a wall around the nearby French Embassy shortly after the war started. Article