The hype and lies about the Iraq oil law

Yesterday, there was some coverage hyping an oil law that passed out of Maliki's cabinet towards the parliamentary committee. Today, the truth starts to bubble out, (Notice that today's very negative AP article is written by the same guy who was so overly positive yesterday.)

Sunni Arab and Kurdish politicians and a powerful Shiite party said Wednesday they had not agreed to a draft bill to regulate the country's oil industry, raising the possibility of new delays in a major piece of benchmark legislation sought for months by the United States.

And, if you read the articles, the Sunnis, Sadrists, and Kurds are really against it.

"Any draft law that is approved in the absence of the Iraqi Accordance Front (Sunni) only represents the groups that approved it," Khalaf al-Ilyan told al-Sharqiya television. "If there are some who want to cancel the voices of half of the Iraqi people then they take the responsibility."

The head of the Sadrist bloc in parliament, Nassar al-Rubaie, said, "We reject this copy of the oil and gas draft law because it left nothing of Iraq's unity."

The Kurds said they had neither seen nor approved the final text and would oppose it if it made "material and substantative changes" to an outline agreed upon during weeks of negotiations.

Reuters,

Sadr's bloc, which has 30 parliamentary seats, said the law must state that no contracts may be signed with firms from countries with troops in Iraq, an official said.

The Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) said it had not seen nor approved the draft.

"We hope the cabinet is not approving a text with which the KRG disagrees because this would violate the constitutional rights of the Kurdistan region," the KRG said in a statement....

Meanwhile, a hardline Sunni Arab clerical body, the Muslim Scholar's Association, issued a fatwa or religious edict saying the draft was "religiously prohibited" because it would allow foreigners to exploit Iraq's oil wealth.

The kicker is that we're not even discussing the "real" oil law as in revenue sharing. As the NYTimes points out, all we're talking about here is the "foreign component," how contract applications by foreign companies are to be assessed.

The framework law, however, is only one part of the oil package. The second crucial element, the law establishing guidelines for dividing Iraq’s oil revenue, has yet to be approved by the cabinet, but Mr. Maliki and his aides said they hoped that there would be progress on that soon.

The "oil law" has been split in an effort to produce something tangible for the to present for the US debates in September. The real reconciliation piece of this, revenue sharing, will be far more difficult than this measure which is already stalling.

To some degree, I think the US is doing this backwards. The US is trying to force revenue sharing to lead to political reconciliation, but this law is being held up by the "unreconciled." Maybe this should be the last piece(after provincial elections and real powersharing) rather than the first.