So seven years later it will come down to this weekend.  Whether President Obama can withdraw all American combat troops from Iraq by August will be decided by the Iraqi elections this weekend.
If the election passes off peacefully, American soldiers will probably go home on schedule. But if there is a repeat of the sectarian [...]

The British military may be gone, but the British oilmen are back. Today is the day that the oil men from BP take control of Iraq’s biggest oilfield: Rumaila.
It is the first important oil deal since the 2003 invasion, and a long time since 1961 when Iraq passed Law 80 that wrestled back 99.5 per [...]

So the great Iraqi oil sell-off continues. The embattled Iraqi Oil Minister Hussain al-Shahristani will today unveil the next round of oil contracts at a conference in Istanbul.
Al-Shahristani is under pressure to pull in investment after the Iraqi government’s first round only secured one deal for the vast Rumaila field: BP and China National Petroleum [...]

After its offer was accepted last month to develop Iraq’s vast Rumaila oil field, BP may have thought it had won the biggest prize in the country’s oil race. But it may not be over yet and BP now faces industrial action.
The trade union representing workers of Iraq’s state-owned Southern Oil Company (SOC) yesterday threatened [...]

This was not meant to happen. In the post-invasion planning of Iraq it was meant to be the American and British oil companies that enjoyed the spoils of war and access to the country’s lucrative oil reserves.
But the Kurds keep putting a proverbial spanner in the works. Iraq’s Kurdish leaders adopted a new constitution two [...]