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2 Oil: The sovereignty showdown in
Iraq By Jack Miles
powerlessness has been an
assumption unchallenged from left or right (in or
out of Iraq), suddenly looks a good deal stronger.
But oil matters more to Washington than
Blackwater does. In September, when the effort to
enact US-favored oil legislation - a
much-announced "benchmark" of both the White House
and Congress - collapsed in Iraq's legislature,
the coup de grace seemed to be delivered by a
wildcat agreement between the
Kurdistan Regional Government
and Hunt Oil of Dallas, Texas, headed by Ray L
Hunt, a longtime Bush ally and a member of the
president's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board.
This agreement, undertaken against the stated
wishes of the Baghdad government, provides for the
separate development of Kurdistan's oil resources
and puts the Kurds in blatant, preemptive
violation of the pending legislation. It makes, in
fact, such a mockery of that legislation that the
prospect of its passage before the Development
Fund mandate expires is now vanishingly small.
Endgame for Iraqi oil? If the
mandate expires and the law is not passed, then
what? Then others in Iraq may well seek to follow
the Kurdish example and cut comparable deals with
whomever they wish. The central government, even
if it has lost effective control of the Kurdish
north and the Sunni west, could well ratify
resource-separatism by contracting for the
development of the oil resources in the territory
generally remaining under its control. Thus, a
new, Iran-allied, oil-rich, nine-province Shi'ite
Iraq could match Kurdistan's deal with one of its
own, perhaps even with ready-and-willing China.
Will any combination of American military and
diplomatic pressure suffice to stop such an
untoward outcome?
Clearly, some in
Washington still think so. Shortly before the
collapse of the Iraqi oil legislation effort,
Bush's Commerce Department began quietly
advertising for an Arabic-speaking legal advisor
to help it in "providing technical assistance to
Iraq to create a legal and tax environment
conducive to domestic and foreign investment in
Iraq's key economic sectors, starting with the
mineral resources sector." (Read: "starting with
oil".) As it happens, the job description overlaps
heavily with that of the Development Fund for
Iraq's existing International Advisory and
Monitoring Board, whose responsibility, according
to UN Security Council Resolution 1483, has been
to see to it "that all export sales of petroleum,
petroleum products, and natural gas from Iraq ...
shall be made consistent with prevailing
international marketing best practices". Is the US
Commerce Department already planning for the
demise of this board? Like the super-embassy and
the super-bases, this bit of Commerce Department
staffing-up bespeaks the urge to continue an
invasive American presence in Iraq, including
Iraq's energy sector, long after December 31,
2008.
But if the occupation is shut down
legally after that date and if Iraqi control over
Iraqi oil reverts - legally, at least - to
something close to pre-war status, that Commerce
Department expert may find him or herself playing
a less-than-major role in Baghdad.
Instead, expect a new role for Iraq's
hitherto excluded pool of domestic expertise. The
Iraq National Oil Company began operations back in
1961; its legacy includes a skilled workforce of
trained oil workers. Notable, in fact, among those
opposed to the failed oil legislation is the Iraqi
Federation of Oil Unions. Its members object to
provisions in the legislation that permit the
hiring of foreign oil workers rather than Iraqis
and - in classic Bush Administration fashion -
exclude the union from any participation in
contract negotiations. The union federation's
protests have attracted a letter of support signed
by six Nobel Peace Prize laureates.
Even
with Iraqi expertise duly factored in, oil remains
a complicated business, and foreign expertise and
capital will remain indispensable in Iraq. Still,
for the Shi'ite-dominated central government, the
most trusted foreign supplier of supplementary
expertise, manpower, and even capital would seem
to be Iran.
For now, the United States is
paying many of the salaries in Baghdad; but Iran's
president, predicting an American withdrawal, has
lately declared his readiness to "fill the
[regional power] gap, with the help of neighbors
and regional friends like Saudi Arabia, and with
the help of the Iraqi nation". This invitation to
regional collaboration will surely strike the less
populous, militarily more vulnerable Saudis as
disingenuous in the extreme, but Iran may be hard
to stop. As former ambassador Peter Galbraith has
explained: "Since 2005, Iraq's Shi'ite-led
government has concluded numerous economic,
political, and military agreements with Iran. The
most important would link the two countries'
strategic oil reserves by building a pipeline from
southern Iraq to Iran, while another commits Iran
to providing extensive military assistance to the
Iraq government." On October 17, the Maliki regime
flexed its supposedly non-existent muscle yet
again by awarding $1.1 billion in contracts to
Iran and China to build enormous power plants in
Baghdad's Shi'ite Sadr City and between the two
Shi'ite holy cities of Najaf and Karbala.
The prospect that, in the endgame for
Iraqi oil, the victor might be Shi'ite Iran (and
indirectly China) may help explain recent American
calls for the replacement of the devoutly Shi'ite
Maliki. Yet, even if American pressure leads to
Maliki's ouster, the Iraqi parliament cannot be
ousted with him. The prime minister's announcement
that the next renewal of the multi-force mandate
would be the last came, in fact, in response to a
binding resolution in parliament that the next
renewal, unlike previous ones, may not be at the
request of the prime minister alone, but only with
the advice and consent of parliament. Parliament
has voted once already, in a non-binding
resolution, to require the United States to set a
timetable for withdrawal.
Fragile as it
is, the government of Iraq enjoys international
legal recognition, and the underestimated Maliki
is evidently not without resources when it comes
to asserting Iraqi sovereignty over American
autonomy within Iraq's borders. In
"Blackwatergate" he found a remarkable pressure
point, declaring that no new law would be passed
in Iraq until the Blackwater matter was resolved
to his satisfaction. Nor was Maliki necessarily
whistling in the dark when he warned his American
critics, "We can find friends elsewhere."
The expiration date that Iraq has now set
for the operation of a multinational force on its
territory coincides almost exactly with the end of
the Bush administration. As that date nears, the
endgame question may become: How far can the
administration go in repudiating its own erstwhile
agenda and returning Iraq to its pre-war status -
that is, to US-backed Sunni domination of Iraqi
domestic politics. That would, of course, result
in armed Iraqi hostility to the administration's
enemy of enemies in the region, Iran, and a
resigned return to collaboration with the
Saudi-dominated Organization of Petroleum
Exporting Countries (OPEC) in the management of
the world oil market, all under a largely offshore
US military umbrella.
Will the fallback
dream now be the one George W Bush's father
entertained after Gulf War I - the creation in
Baghdad of a kinder, gentler Saddam Hussein with
whom, to use the classic phrase, the US can "do
business"?
Time will tell, but not too
much time. The eerie silence of the Bush
administration about oil grows all the more
deafening as the price of crude climbs toward $100
a barrel. Blood for oil may never have been a good
deal, but so much blood for no oil at all may seem
a far worse one.
Jack Miles is
senior fellow for religious affairs with the
Pacific Council on International Policy and
professor of English and religious studies at the
University of California, Irvine. He is the author
of the Pulitzer Prize-winning God: A
Biography, among other works.
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