A law that could shape Iraq's future by clearing the way for investment in its oil fields is deadlocked by a battle for control of the reserves and no end to the impasse is in sight, lawmakers and officials say.
The bill is also meant to share revenue equitably from the world's third largest oil reserves, thus helping bridge the deep divides between Iraq's Shi'ites, Sunni Arabs and Kurds.
The one thing all sides agree on is the law is vital to securing foreign investment to boost Iraq's oil output and rebuild its shattered economy after five years of insurgency and sectarian fighting that has killed tens of thousands of people.
But the law remains stalled by bitter rows between Baghdad and the largely autonomous Kurdistan region in the north over who will control the fields and how revenue will be shared.
"Basically we're talking about political will here," said a U.S. official in Baghdad, who asked not to be identified.
"These are not technical issues, it's a question of if they have the political will to reach the kind of compromises both sides need to make to achieve this. There's a lack of trust."
The failure to ratify an oil revenue law highlights two colossal blunders at the heart of the Bush/neocon plans for Iraq. The administration claimed, and probably believed, that Iraqi oil production would pay for a significant share of the reconstruction costs. Those estimates were always ridiculously rosy. The day Baghdad collapsed to the invading US forces, Dick Cheney said Iraq would be producing 3 million barrels of oil a day by the end of 2003, despite the fact that Iraq hadn't produced that much oil since prior to the Iran-Iraq war (pdf). Even though recent production levels have gone up, Iraq still only pumps a little more than 2 million barrels per day (pdf), less than it did before the US invasion.
The deeper problem, however, is that the Kurds are cutting their own oil deals because they want out of Iraq. When a people are the victim of a genocide—like Saddam's Anfal against the Kurds—they won't happily unify with the people they believe perpetrated the genocide against them. Kurds don't see the Anfal as uniquely tied to the person of Saddam Hussien. They associate it with the Sunni Arabs. Thus, it's not surprising that they don't want to be in a state in which they have to submit to the political wishes of Sunni Arabs. Kurdish desires for independence are especially strong since they've conducted their own business and run their own de facto Kurdish state in northern Iraq since the conclusion of the Gulf War in 1991.
With the Kurds uninterested and probably unwilling to remain in Iraq, it's naïve to think that it will be easy, if even possible, to pass oil revenue laws that will be satisfactory to all groups in Iraq. We can conduct all the military surges we want, but we can't make Iraqis create and maintain a viable country if they simply do not want to remain a cohesive nation state. The Bush administration bumbled in to Iraq, destabilized the state and the region, and now doesn't have a plan for how to end the conflict and extricate our troops from the battlefield. This is something I wrote some months back:
Iraq is Humpty Dumpty, but we pushed him off the wall, and all the king’s Armored Cavalry and all the king’s mechanized brigades will not put him back together again. The president said this war in Iraq is "just, and right, and necessary." No, the war in Iraq is futile. The American people have figured that out. Now, it’s time to stop talking about leaving our troops in Iraq to train Iraqi military units, because there aren’t any. It’s time to stop expecting progress and the achievement of benchmarks by the Iraqi government, because there’s no Iraqi government that has legitimacy with the population of Iraq. It’s time to stop thinking that we can put Iraq back together again. It’s time to face the reality that Iraq no longer exists, start making plans to remove our troops, and get the leadership of the Iraqi factions and the leadership of the surrounding nations to engage in trying to mitigate the suffering and chaos that will ensue when we leave, but will also happen if we stay.
Nothing significant has changed in the intervening five months to make Iraq a more feasible nation-state. It's a mess, we need to get out troops out, and it will be one of the most daunting challenges left to our next president.