This is going well

Little blurb in the LA Times last week on the rancorous ending to a Parliamentary debate in Iraq. It illustrates not only the tension and bitterness in that body, but also the extremely complicated situation, with rival Sunnis battling over a perceived slight to a Shiite legislator.

Josh Marshall picks up another thread in this discussion of Iraq's inability to come to agreement on the vaunted "oil law" which is supposed to provide an equitable distribution of oil revenues to the competing groups in the country. The bottom line is that we may not even be able to qualify and define what "progress" in Iraq is, let alone identify any.

The problems of the oil bill bode poorly for the other so-called benchmarks that the Bush administration has been pressuring Prime Minister Nouri Maliki's government to meet. Those include provincial elections, reversing a prohibition against former Baath Party members holding government and military positions and revision of Iraq's constitution.