Thread: Archive Latest News - Think Tank - 16/08/07 - 03/11/07

Crucial oil compromise falls apart

THREE-WAY AGREEMENT HAD BEEN LANGUISHING IN IRAQI PARLIAMENT

Article Launched: 09/13/2007

BAGHDAD - A carefully constructed compromise on a draft law governing Iraq's rich oil fields, agreed to in February after months of arduous talks among Iraqi political groups, appears to have collapsed. The apparent breakdown comes just as Congress and the White House are struggling to find evidence that there is progress toward reconciliation and a functioning government.

Senior Iraqi negotiators met in Baghdad on Wednesday in an attempt to salvage the original compromise, two participants said. But the meeting came against the backdrop of a public series of increasingly strident disagreements over the draft law that has broken out in recent days between Hussein Shahristani, the Iraqi minister of oil, and officials of the provincial government in the Kurdish north, where some of the nation's largest fields are located.

Shahristani, a senior member of the Arab Shiite coalition that controls the federal government, negotiated the compromise with leaders of the Kurdish and Arab Sunni parties. But since then the Kurds have pressed forward with a regional version of the law that Shahristani insists, much to the irritation of the Kurds, is illegal.

Many of the Sunnis who supported the original deal also have pulled out in recent months.

The oil law - which would govern how oil fields are developed and managed - is one of several benchmarks that the Bush administration has been pressing the Iraqis to meet as a sign they are making headway toward creating an effective government.
Again and again in the past year, agreement on the law has been fleetingly close before political and sectarian disagreements have arisen to stall the deal.

One of the participants in Wednesday's meeting, Deputy Prime Minister Barham Saleh, who has worked for much of the past year to push for the original compromise, said some progress had been made at the meeting, but that he could not guarantee success.

"This has been like a roller coaster. There were occasions where we seemed to be there, where we seemed to have closure, only to fail at that," said Saleh, who is Kurdish.

"Given the seriousness of the issue, I don't want to create false expectations, but I can say there is serious effort to bring this to closure," he said.

The legislation already has been presented to the Iraqi parliament, which has been unable to take any action on it for months.

Contributing to the dispute over the draft law is the decision by the Kurds to begin signing development and service contracts with international oil companies before the federal law is passed.

Also on Wednesday, gunmen wearing police commando uniforms waylaid an armored truck on a major Baghdad street, overpowered the guards and made off with about a half-million dollars in Iraqi currency, police said.

The robbers set up a fake checkpoint with two police vehicles along the Mohammed al-Qassim highway in eastern Baghdad, the police said, flagged down the armored truck and offered to escort it to its destination in downtown Baghdad.

Along the way, the 10 gunmen forced the driver to pull over near a university campus, police said. There they handcuffed and gagged the truck's occupants - five guards, one accountant and a driver - and stole the money.

One officer quoted the accountant as saying the cash was being carried from a factory in the Zafaraniyah neighborhood to a private bank.

The U.S. military announced Wednesday that U.S. and Iraqi forces have captured at least 50 suspected insurgents this week.

Fifteen were picked up Wednesday during operations targeting Al-Qaida in Iraq leaders in the north of the country. Two of them were suspected of plotting to attack the Mosul airfield during Ramadan, the military said.

http://www.mercorynews.com/nationwor...nclick_check=1

FRENCH FM SAYS WORLD HAS TO WORK WITH MALIKI

Received Thursday, 13 September 2007

LONDON, Sept 13, 2007 (AFP) - French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner said Thursday there was no choice but to work with Iraq's embattled Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki, having previously called for his resignation.
Asked on BBC radio about a lack of authority in Maliki's administration, Kouchner replied: "I know. The Iraqis told me that but the government is in place and Mr Maliki is the prime minister. We have to work with him.
"There is no choice, we have to work with the Iraqis through the government," he said in the telephone interview.
Kouchner was forced to offer an apology last month for saying Maliki should resign for failing to stem the violence.

LTE Professional Website Hosting Services Directory

Report: Iraq oil-sharing law in shambles

Posted : Thu, 13 Sep 2007

BAGHDAD, Sept. 13 An Iraqi draft law regarding oil revenue sharing among Shiites, Sunnis and Kurds is falling apart as Kurds have begun signing contracts on their own.

Consensus among the three factions on the bulk of the law was reached in February. Since then, the Kurdish regional government has signed two exploration contracts on its own, a New York Times correspondent in Baghdad reported Thursday.

After the first contract, Sunni legislators began falling away from supporting the bill.

Jamal Abdullah, a spokesman for the Kurdistan Regional Government, told the Times allegations Kurds were taking steps to secede from Iraq were unfounded.

"We reject what some parties say -- that it is a step toward separation -- because we have drafted the Kurdistan oil law depending on Article 111 of the Iraqi Constitution, which says oil and natural resources are properties of Iraqi people," Abdullah said.

Iraq's major oil fields are in the Kurdish north, and Shiite-dominated south, making revenue-sharing a sticking point for Sunnis, the report said.

http://www.earthtimes.com/articles/show/106917.html

US-Orchestrated Iraqi Oil Bill Stalled

Thursday September 13, 2007

The NY Times reports that "[a] carefully constructed compromise on a draft law governing Iraq’s rich oil fields, agreed to in February after months of arduous talks among Iraqi political groups, appears to have collapsed."

What the Times mentions no where in its report is this: the United States orchestrated the law. According to The (London) Guardian, it would open up the oil fields to foreign corporations -- oil fields which were nationalized (ie, put off-limits to foreigners) in 1972. Moreover, the law would remove contract authority from the the Parliament and place it in the hands of an unelected board consisting of oil industry executives.

Don't expect to read any of these details in the US press: I've found them only in the British press. However, Walter Pincus reported on Monday that the Commerce Department is looking for an expert to help "the U.S. Department of Commerce [provide] 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."

Here's more background on the law from The Guardian, in an excerpt from Naomi Klein's new book.

In December 2006, the bipartisan Iraq Study Group fronted by James Baker issued its long-awaited report. It called for the US to "assist Iraqi leaders to reorganise the national oil industry as a commercial enterprise" and to "encourage investment in Iraq's oil sector by the international community and by international energy companies."

Most of the Iraq Study Group's recommendations were ignored by the White House, but not this one: the Bush administration immediately pushed ahead by helping to draft a radical new oil law for Iraq, which would allow companies such as Shell and BP to sign 30-year contracts in which they could keep a large share of Iraq's oil profits, amounting to tens or even hundreds of billions of dollars - unheard of in countries with as much easily accessible oil as Iraq, and a sentence to perpetual poverty in a country where 95% of government revenues come from oil. This was a proposal so wildly unpopular that even Bremer had not dared make it in the first year of occupation. Yet it was coming up now, thanks to deepening chaos. Explaining why it was justified for such a large percentage of the profits to leave Iraq, the oil companies cited the security risks. In other words, it was the disaster that made the proposed radical law possible.

The law that was finally adopted by Iraq's cabinet in February 2007 was even worse than anticipated: it placed no limits on the amount of profits that foreign companies can take from the country and placed no specific requirements about how much or little foreign investors would partner with Iraqi companies or hire Iraqis to work in the oil fields.

Most brazenly, it excluded Iraq's elected parliamentarians from having any say in the terms for future oil contracts. Instead, it created a new body, the Federal Oil and Gas Council, which, according to the New York Times, would be advised by "a panel of oil experts from inside and outside Iraq".

This unelected body, advised by unspecified foreigners, would have ultimate decision-making power on all oil matters, with the full authority to decide which contracts Iraq did and did not sign. In effect, the law called for Iraq's publicly owned oil reserves, the country's main source of revenues, to be exempted from democratic control and run instead by a powerful, wealthy oil dictatorship, which would exist alongside Iraq's broken and ineffective government.

Iraq has the third largest reserves of oil in the world -- and the major oil companies have wanted to get their paws on this resource for years. The Financial Times reported in 2005 that major international oil companies had been implicated Volker's review of the oil-for-food program.

US-Orchestrated Iraqi Oil Bill Stalled

Turkey plans to build fence on its borders with Iraq

General Staff General Yasar Buyukanit along with elite of experts are evaluating details of a project to erect a USD 3.2 billion concrete fence on its borders with Iraq to stop infiltration of Kurdish Workers Party's (PKK) rebels.

However, de****e conflicting reports of Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri Al-Maliki's deal with Turkey in authorizing Turkish forces to pursue PKK rebels on Iraqi soils, a claim AL-Maliki has denied.

Turkish News Agency (Anadolu) quoting military reports said preliminary examination of the borders area aims at building a concrete fence between Iraq and Turkey to stop infiltration operations.

Turkish sources said Buyukanit stressed during his last meeting with his staff on securing Turkish borders with Iraq.

The Source also said the fence will be almost 473 kilometer long, divided into two parts, one is concrete and the second is an electronic monitoring one.

http://www.kuna.net.kw/NewsAgenciesP...64&Language=en

Lawmakers deadlocked in negotiations on Iraq's oil law, a key benchmark of political progress

BAGHDAD (AP) - Iraq's main political parties are deadlocked over a key oil law and the legislation has been sent back to party leaders to see if they can salvage it, an official involved in the talks said Thursday.

The Wednesday meeting failed after Shiite and Sunni Arab representatives were unable to agree with Kurdish negotiators, said the official, who represented a Shiite party in the talks and spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss the process.

Deputy Prime Minister Barham Saleh, a Kurd, confirmed there were disagreements but refused to give details. ''There are problems but the negotiations are still going on,'' he told The Associated Press.

The oil legislation is among 18 benchmark laws pushed by Washington to encourage reconciliation among Iraq's ethnic and sectarian factions, and is intended as a way of managing the country's vast reserves while seeking to ensure the profits are shared equitably.

The Iraqi Cabinet approved a draft and forwarded it to parliament last February, a move hailed by the White House as a breakthrough in efforts to approve critical legislation for the nation's future.

But parliament kicked the bill back to the Cabinet citing legal technicalities and the measure has been bogged down in further negotiations ever since.

At Wednesday's meeting, Shiites and Sunni Arabs agreed on language giving more powers to the predominantly Sunni center of the country - where there is little oil - while Kurds argued in favor of more control for their semiautonomous and oil-rich northern region as outlined in the Cabinet-approved version, the official said.

Other disagreements came over how to manage oil fields, both operating and as-yet undiscovered, the official said.

The Shiites and Sunni Arabs argued that contracts covering fields that produce more than 100,000 barrels of oil per day must have parliamentary approval, and that contracts from smaller fields should be approved by the state-run National Oil Company, the official said.

The Kurdish side argued that contracts should be decided by regional authorities, he said.

Complicating matters, the Kurdish self-governing region in northern Iraq in August enacted its own law governing foreign oil investments, angering the central government in Baghdad.

The Kurds have also unilaterally gone ahead and signed contracts with international oil companies, most recently signing a deal last week with Texas' Hunt Oil Co. on production sharing in the region.

Iraq's oil minister Hussain al-Shahristani, a Shiite, declared Monday that the agreement was illegal - underscoring the central government's position that exploration contracts with foreign companies cannot be signed until the new national law is in place.

The Kurdistan Regional Government issued a statement a day later saying al-Shahristani's comments were ''unacceptable,'' and that he ''should concentrate on making a positive contribution to the country, rather than undermining the constructive work that the KRG (Kurdistan Regional Government) is carrying out for the benefit of all the Iraqi people.''

Santa Barbara News-Press

ANALYSIS: Arabs view Iraq report as setting stage for long-term stay

The report presented to the US Congress earlier this week by General David Petraeus, commander of US forces in Iraq, and the US ambassador in Baghdad, Ryan Crocker, is intended to prepare public opinion in the United States for a long-term US military presence in the region, Arab analysts said Thursday. They contend that the two men's focus on the Iranian threat as a key element in the Iraqi conflict, even if it is a reality, had the aim of providing a "cover-up for the US military failure" in Iraq.

"I believe the report paves the ground for a long-term US military presence in the region," Adnan Hayajneh, professor of International Relations at Jordan's Hashemiyah University, told Deutsche Presse-Agentur dpa.

"I think the remarks by Petraeus and Crocker indicate that the United States still has several objectives to accomplish in the region," the US-educated academic added.

Petraeus told congressmen that some troops could begin coming home by the end of 2007, with US forces in Iraq returning to pre-surge levels by next summer.

However, neither Petraeus nor Crocker, who were grilled by lawmakers, could speculate as to when the US troops could leave Iraq.

"I believe the report tries to find a way out of the US impasse in Iraq," Mohammad al-Masri an analyst at the Strategic Studies Centre of the University of Jordan told dpa.

"Petraeus and Crocker tried to address two elements preserving US interests in Iraq and at the same time reducing the human cost incurred by the US army," he added.

Taher Adwan, editor-in-chief of the Jordanian daily newspaper Alarab Alyawm, considers the most dangerous element of the report lay in "setting the stage for prolonged military occupation of Iraq."

"The possible pullout either at the end of the year or next summer pertains only to the post-surge 30,000 troops. Petraeus mentioned nothing about the pre-surge 130,000 forces," he said.

"This puts the US handling of the issue in its true perspective, a language of new imperialism that depends on military bases and fights to control oilfields," he added.

The analysts detected an element of "opportunism" in the report's emphasis on the Iranian threat being one of the potential factors threatening stability in Iraq.

They pointed out that the administration of President George W Bush, the Congress and all US bodies linked to the decision-making process knew about the Iranian influence in Iraq even before the US-led invasion of Iraq in March 2003.

Petraeus told congressmen that Iran was fighting a "proxy war" through Shiite militias against the Iraqi state and the US-led forces in the war-torn nation.

In the view of Arab analysts, Bush has so far ignored complaints from his Arab allies regarding the Iranian threat and the destabilising role of Shiite militias because Tehran supported the US occupation of Iraq and the toppling of the regime of former dictator Saddam Hussein, Iran's arch foe.

"Even Bush played up grievances by the Shiite community in Iraq to rally backing for the occupation forces," Hayajneh said.

"By underscoring the Iranian danger now, the Americans are apparently trying to justify their failure in Iraq and to derive support from Sunni allies in the region for their future plans," he added.

Some Arab analysts went as far as to suggest that the US was trying to convince Arabs that their "real enemy was Iran and not Israel."

But al-Masri ruled out such a substitution before a settlement had been reached in the Arab-Israeli conflict.

"There is a gap between the United States and Arab countries as far as the definition of the Iranian threat is concerned," he said, alluding to US and Israeli concerns over the advancing Iranian nuclear programme.

"What the Petreus-Crocker report sought to do was merely to put the Iranian threat on the map again," he added.

The report was also criticized across the Arab world for its failure to address the sufferings of the Iraqi people and to put forward an appraisal of the performance of the controversial government of Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki.

"Almost all recent US reports have ignored the plight of the Iraqi people," al-Masri said.

"I believe the new report is concerned only with addressing the US internal dimension of the Iraqi problem ahead of the presidential elections," he added.

This viewpoint was supported by Adwan, who considered the Petraeus-Crocker report as reflecting an "unrealistic vision that has nothing to do with the facts of the current Iraqi situation."

ANALYSIS: Arabs view Iraq report as setting stage for long-term stay : Middle East World

Mutaki Speaks on the Relations Between Iran and Kurdistan

Iranian Foreign Minister Manuchahir Mutaki stressed that there are no problems in the relations between Iran and Iraqi Kurdistan, and he said “there are elements seeking to damage these relations, and there are the terrorists that stir up problems in the area to harm relations of Iran with Kurdistan.”

Maher Iranian News Agency reported Mutaki’s speech about the development in Iraqi Kurdistan, when he said “Iran offered lodging for the Kurdish strugglers and gave them humanitarian assistances to fight against Saddam’s regime.”

Mutaki highlighted the good relations between Iran and Iraqi Kurdistan, and the participation of Iranian companies in the reconstruction of the Region.

He considered their border procedures as a natural matter, and he said “it is necessary to take measures that prevent the terrorists from using the Iraqi borders to enter Iran areas.”

PUKmedia :: English - Mutaki Speaks on the Relations Between Iran and Kurdistan

7 Million Dollars Allocated for Halabja

In frame work of the budget of developing the regions, KRG allocated 7 million dollars from Sulaimani governorate budget for Halabja.

“From the total budget allocated for Sulaimani, 7 million dollars have been allocated for Halabja .We want to designate a proper program with the related offices in the city on how to utilize from the money and how to spend it. ”Halabja acting governor told PUKmedia on Thursday

PUKmedia :: English - 7 Million Dollars Allocated for Halabja

Iraqi Confederation?

We tried it in the United States from 1781 until the Constitution was ratified in 1789.

Columnist Charles Krauthammer observes that the political process in Iraq is moving in the direction of informal partitioning into a Kurdish region in the north, a Sunni region, and a Shiite province in the south, with Baghdad as a mixed religious/ethnic capital region.

In superficial respects, such an arrangement is similar to the government in the United States under the Articles of Confederation, instituted after our War of Independence.

There is, however, a crucial difference between the arrangement among the original thirteen states and the situation in Iraq. The American states were unified, whatever their geographic, economic, and religious sectarian differences, by a common English heritage of constitutional government and by the fact that ours was a Christian nation in which religious toleration was firmly established.

Even so, the United States under the Articles of Confederation, as George Washington described it, became a bad joke. Congress had no power to compel states to obey its laws, to pay taxes, or to provide soldiers and sailors to protect the nation from foreign aggressors. States, from time to time, simply ignored requests from Congress.

Will Iraq, with deep-seated religious and cultural differences, function even as well as did the United States under the Articles of Confederation? Memories of savage repression by the Sunni minority under Saddam Hussein further exacerbate matters.

From the standpoint of our own foreign policy, the major danger is that a weak Iraqi confederation of Kurds, Sunnis, and Shiites may lead to continual aggression by Iran on the western border and by Syria on the northern border. If the Iraqi confederation begins to fall apart,Turkey will probably enter the fray to forestall Kurdish nationalism within its borders.

Should Iran pursue its aim to dominate the Middle East, we could find them controlling, directly or by threats, all of the Middle East's oil, from Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Kuwait, to Iran itself. Iran could then hold us hostage to shut-offs of oil supplies, for example, if they decided to annihilate Israel.

As Mr. Krauthammer notes, even a weak confederation, if it holds, will be better than the current terrorist strife. Conceivably, if the Kurds, Sunnis, and Shiites feel that their own religious and political aspirations are sufficiently respected under a confederation, they will be motivated to cooperate against aggression from Iran and Syria.

The most encouraging sign is that, as American troops push out terrorists and impose military order, from neighborhood to neighborhood, local tribal leaders are turning against the terrorists and providing better intelligence to our troops. This suggests that, given a path toward anti-terror stability, Iraqis of all religious and cultural stripes, will take it.

PUKmedia :: English - Iraqi Confederation?