War Is Boring

Iraq’s parliament is debating a new oil law that would open the country’s 112-billion-barrel oil reserves to foreign investment. The law is critical to expanding Iraq’s struggling, $40-billion economy, according to Under Secretary of Defense for Business Transformation Paul Brinkley. “Iraq has significant but aging infrastructure for access to raw petroleum. There is relatively little refining capacity – one of the reasons there is great interest in hydrocarbon laws. Until that is passed, investment in hydrocarbon and refining is not going to happen.”

But hundreds of Iraqis have protested the law, saying it will open Iraq to harmful exploitation, according to UPI:

A list of 419 Iraqi “intellectuals and professionals” have signed a letter to Iraq’s government, urging it not to move forward with the draft oil law. The letter follows two previous letters — one sent in the spring by 61 Iraq oil experts and another sent by 108 Iraqi oil, legal and economic experts last month — that call on Iraq’s Parliament to delay the oil law until issues like security and other quality-of-life issues are dealt with first. The new letter, given to UPI Thursday by former Iraq Oil Minister Issam Chalabi, has been signed by “intellectuals and professionals including academics, doctors, writers, engineers, lawyers, economists, diplomats, journalists, former ministers and senior officials,” Chalabi said. “Oil represents the principal revenues of Iraq, so on it and on the endeavors of its citizens relies the advancement, development and reconstructions of the country,” the letter states. The experts say the law will break up Iraq’s nationalized oil sector, causing mismanagement and an influx of foreign investors, which has been opposed by the oil unions, most prominently, as well as political parties.

AlterNet quotes an expert who says that the law represents misplaced priorities:

“There is no hurry whatsoever,” said Muhammad-Ali Zainy, senior energy economist and analyst at the London-based Center for Global Energy Studies. “Iraq really, now, is bleeding and losing its people in this horrible way and there is terrorism and all that and lack of the provisional basic services. “Everything bad, there is in Iraq. Why should the government leave all these urgent needs to be addressed and then go to the hydrocarbon law?”

The Kurds disagree. According to the Associated Press, the autonomous Kurdistan Regional Government has already passed its own version of the oil law that formally grants foreign companies the right to tap Kurdish oil. As I reported for The Washington Times last year, foreign firms have been searching for new fields in Kurdistan, with the regional government’s approval, since late 2005 – the only new oil exploration happening in all of Iraq. And while the latest draft of the federal law divides oil revenue up between all of Iraq’s provinces, including the Kurdish ones, the KRG last year refused to share wealth generated by its own fields. Whether this has changed, I don’t know.

Related posts:

1. Flashback: In Iraq, Paralyzed by Trash
2. Afghanistan the Abstraction
3. Flashback: After the Surge: Is the British Withdrawal from Southern Iraq a Model for U.S. Forces?