The long goodbye

At last, Tony Blair is off. He came to Baghdad unannounced yesterday for a last chat with the big guns here and 3 mortars went off in the IZ just as he was arriving. He went down to Basra for a "morale boosting" session with British troops down there and again a mortar went off. It's funny reading suggestions that he may have been targeted - if he really was targeted there would have been 10 times as many projectiles coming in. There were a lot last week and apparently the week before, with some injuries and two Iraqis killed. It seems to have quietened down a bit the last few days; in fact it seems to have been a few quiet days generally across Baghdad. Only a temporary respite, no doubt, but a welcome one.

The draft oil and gas law seems to have taken a few steps backwards. A significant part of the draft law is its annexes, which set out who controls which oil fields. There was a meeting in Dubai a few weeks ago at which the draft of the annexes was changed considerably, and the Kurdistan Regional Government won't back the law as it currently stands. So the law itself is a long, long way from being passed.

I joined a band a while ago which is proving, for me, to be the difference between tolerating being in Baghdad and positively enjoying it. We played a few gigs at various places, which were a mixture of private compounds or villas. We've been asked to play the UK and US embassies as well so those are a couple of gigs to look forward to. We were supposed to play the US Embassy last week but in the event we couldn't as our bass player wasn't back from leave in time. That was a relief in some ways because of the relative danger of playing a gig there - it would have been outside, by the pool, which gets hit by mortars from time to time. Would have been a hell of a buzz though.

In the US, finally Paul Wolfowitz has resigned as head of the World Bank. It's incredible that he was ever appointed, being as it was a major "up yours" to all those who opposed the invasion of Iraq, seeing as he was a chief architect of it. It's incredible too that he fought so hard to stay in the job when it was clear that the vast majority of the Bank's staff wanted him out and that he had clearly breached the Bank's rules on conflicts of interest. But that's symptomatic of the Bush crowd's arrogance. The US Attorney General, Alberto Gonzales, is in a similar predicament now. He was, it seems, instrumental in the sacking of 8 federal prosecutors in the US who failed to toe the Bush Administration's line on policy matters. That action badly undermines the separation between the legislature and the judiciary which is fundamental to valid democracies. It's probably only a matter of time before he will be fired or forced to resign, but it's another example of one of the neocon cabal that's grimly hanging on despite clear evidence of not being fit for the job.

It's getting warmer here by the day. Supposed to hit 42 celcius on Tuesday so it's getting towards the 3 months when it won't be below 40 and often gets to 50 or more. Shame there's no decent beach around here....