Plus:
*Russia and Iraq — quid pro quo on oil for debt
*Attacks on Iraq’s energy sector shut down power grid, bomb found on Electricity Ministry’s doorstep
*State Dept. critiqued by its own for lax dealings with Iraq government
*Iraqi Kurds in U.S. push for investment beyond oil
*Oil for refugees
*Much more…

Political disputes over Iraq’s Constitution need to be resolved before progress on the oil law, said the deputy head of the Parliament’s Energy Committee. “This will make the way to pass the law of oil and gas,” Abdul-Hadi al-Hasani told United Press International’s Ben Lando in a phone interview from London. “It will be very easy to be passed because we won’t have any disagreements. Roadblocks now are not technical, they are political.”

Russia’s Finance Minister said Russian firms will get special advantage to invest $4 billion in Iraq following Moscow’s agreement last week to erase $12 billion in Saddam-era debt. Alexi Kudrin also said Russia would get “special attention to the previously signed deals,” alluding to Russian firm Lukoil’s Saddam-era deal to develop the W. Qurna oil field, a massive field in Iraq’s south, Darya Korsunskaya reports for Reuters. Saddam cancelled the deal in 2002; he said Lukoil wasn’t doing the work while Lukoil said sanctions prevented it. Lukoil contends Saddam’s cancellation wasn’t legal under international law. Iraq’s government says otherwise and is currently in negotiations with Chevron for a technical service agreement for it. Lukoil’s vice president, however, says the firm will start work on W. Qurna in three to five years.

“A bomb struck a gas pipeline in northern Iraq on Monday, causing widespread power outages that the electricity minister warned could last up to a week,” The Associated Press reports. “The explosion devastated the section of pipeline in the Sebat district about 30 kilometers (20 miles) northeast of Tikrit, one of a series of recent attacks in an apparent show of power by suspected Sunni insurgents who have been driven north by U.S.-led crackdowns in Baghdad and surrounding areas. … Electricity Minister Karim Waheed said the pipeline had provided fuel to power stations in the northern cities of Kirkuk and Beiji and the blast would mean a weeklong cut in electricity for the area. … Waheed also said authorities had found a huge bomb Monday at the entrance to the electricity ministry in Baghdad. The explosives were safely defused, but the discovery underscored the continued threat to government infrastructure despite stepped up security measures. “Today the bomb reached the ministry’s entrance,” Waheed told The Associated Press. “If there is no security or political stability I cannot promise people any progress in the electricity sector.””

A blast at a gas pipeline feeding a power station on Monday and a car bomb targeting power lines at another station the day before have cut electricity to a quarter of Iraq’s roughly 27 million people, officials said, Reuters reports.

A car bomb cut power to northeast Iraq during a visit by U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates. “A car bomb blast on Sunday near the Mosul power plant severed cables of power pylons, disrupting supplies from the plant to the power network in the north-east,” the spokesman for the Ministry of Electricity, Aziz Sultan, told the Voices of Iraq (VOI) news agency, Deutsche Presse Agentur reports.The plant produces 400 megawatts and is located in Ninevah province. It and Salahaddin province suffered attacks Sunday, killing 53 people.

Iraqis are “not invested” in the draft oil law and it’s the U.S. State Department’s fault, a former top department official said in a newly leaked memo, UPI’s Ben Lando reports. Manuel Miranda, who recently left his post as director of the Office of Legislative Statecraft in Baghdad, issued a scathing critique of the U.S. diplomatic corps’ ability and capacity to engage and assist Iraq’s fledgling government. “Any experienced international lawyer could have judged in 15 seconds or less that the draft that your predecessor checked off as if done, was one in which Iraqis were not invested,” Miranda wrote. “This has repeated itself again and again.”

“The future” isn’t just oil, the head of the U.S. branch of Iraq’s Kurdish government said while courting investors in Washington Monday. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce is hosting a luncheon with the Kurdistan Regional Government, Iraq’s semiautonomous three northern provinces, featuring top U.S. and business officials.

“While the development of our oil and gas sector will be critical for our sustained development, and we place great emphasis on it, the Kurdistan region’s economy is not solely dependent on oil and gas,” Qubad Talabani, the KRG’s representative to the United States and son of Iraqi President Jalal Talabani, told UPI’s Ben Lando. “In fact, we are spoilt for choice. For example, we have enormous agricultural potential as well as a robust workforce that is entrepreneurial and industrious.”

The top parliamentarian in Iraq’s Displacement and Migration Committee wants “3 to 5 percent” of the country’s oil proceeds to be dedicated to helping refugees, UPI reports. There are an estimated 2.2 million internally displaced Iraqis and more than 2 million outside the country, according to the United Nations, effects of the 2003 invasion and subsequent decline in security and quality of life.

Iran will start development of a power station in Iraq’s Najaf province, a 320 megawatt grant from its neighbor, a provincial spokesman said, UPI reports.

Iraq’s Missan province says it has run out of kerosene after recent disruptions in Iraq’s refinery and electricity sectors, which has hampered fuel stocks, UPI reports. Accidental and malicious fires in refineries around the country and along the power grid, as well as reductions in fuel and power supplies from neighboring Turkey and Kuwait, have hurt the once gaining sectors.

U.S. Commerce Secretary Carlos Gutierrez was in Iraq over the weekend, talking to Iraqi leaders and at a luncheon organized by the American Chamber of Commerce in Iraq, Gina Chon reports for The Wall Street Journal. Gutierrez urged Iraq to diversify its business away from current oil domination as a way toward a sustainable economy, Agence France-Presse reports. Of course, his talk was a largely free market pep rally, and Iraq, being sovereign and all, may choose to rely on the nationalized economy some of its neighbors have relied on. At the very least, the world should be wary of pressing Iraq to “liberalize,” considering the damage such moves did during the Bremer year, totally ruining what was left of Iraq’s non-oil business sector.

“It’s all aboard for hope as the Basra express leaves on time.”

It pulls out of Baghdad Central station on the stroke of 9.00am — a tiny train loaded with great symbolic freight. It consists of nothing more than a locomotive, Martin Fletcher writes for The Times of London, three rickety old carriages and a goods van, and, on this particular morning, only 20 passengers. But what matters is that a rudimentary service to Basra, abandoned as Iraq was engulfed by violence, is finally up and running again.

Indeed, this is the first passenger service to resume anywhere in Iraq after the horrors of recent years, and its resumption is one of those telling little indicators that suggest the country might have turned a corner. …

The Iraq Press Roundup, a tally of views from Iraq’s editorial pages, by UPI’s Hiba Dawood.

The Road to Learning Can Be Dangerous, Ahmed Ali and Dahr Jamail report for Inter-Press Service. University professors now enjoy increased pay, but in the face of threats and isolation, there is little they are able to do in the world of academics.

The “bottom-up” leadership process in Iraq is a four-part series published b y the online Middle East roundtable, Bitter Lemons International.

To treat Iraq’s collapse into local politics as a success story is laughable, writes Jonathan Steele, senior foreign correspondent for The Guardian.

Anbar is quieter, not pacified, and the means employed are a distinctly mixed blessing, writes Gabriel Rose, a development worker in Anbar province.

Many of the support councils quickly become gardens where local leaders grow, writes Safa A. Hussein, former member of the Iraqi Governing Council and member of the Iraqi National Security Council.

The tribal mechanism has demonstrated its effectiveness and has earned a place in a modern Iraq, writes Jaber Aljaberi, president of the Iraq Future Foundation.
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