Essential reading: Seumas Milne on "Essential misreading"

Comment is free: Essential misreading: "There's now a well-established tradition in Britain of recantations by people who have moved from left to right, and either try to justify their embrace of the powers-that-be or, alternatively, insist they haven't changed at all, it's their former allies who've abandoned their principles. The genre goes back at least to the anti-communist tome The God that Failed"

I like this article, and it links back to the even more excellent piece he wrote in the grauniad immediately after the september 11 attacks, which stands up better than ever. Seumas Milne for president.

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Guardian Unlimited | Comment is free | Good news from Baghdad at last: the oil law has stalled: "the administration - particularly the vice-president, Dick Cheney - and the oil lobby are enraged that the oil law is stalled. The main reason is not that the Iraqi government and parliament are a lazy bunch of Islamist incompetents or narrow-minded sectarians, as is often implied. MPs are studying the law more carefully, and have begun to see it as a major threat to Iraq's national interest regardless of people's religion or sect.

This is the second bit of good news from Iraq. Civil society, trade unions, professional oil experts and the media are stirring on the oil issue and putting their points across to parliament in the way democracy is meant to work. The oil unions have held strikes even at the risk of having leaders and members arrested."