Does Iraq still need a hydrocarbon law? According to Tariq Shafiq who co-authored the first version of Iraq’s Oil & Gas Law in 2006, yes it does. So do others including the Kurds who made its enactment one of the conditions for backing Nouri al-Maliki for PM last year, and the latter as well since he agreed to do it within six months of taking office.
However, the recent revival of the OGL has become again bogged down in controversy amid conflicting interests as well as conflicting visions of the nature of the federal state Iraq should be. One of those visions is endorsed in the 2011 version of the OGL proposed by parliament’s Oil & Energy Committee, with obvious heavy Kurdish input. That vision strips the central government of any meaningful authority over the oil and gas sector and turns the federal oil ministry into a dormant entity, while all the powers and the decision making are put in the hands of the regions and provinces.
The other vision is put in a slightly modified 2011 version of the Feb 2007 draft OGL approved at the time by the council of ministers, which encompasses the views of the central government, or more precisely the oil actors in the central government. This version seeks to safeguard the central government control over the oil sector – being the livelihood of the whole nation – while it emphasizes a big degree of cooperation between the center and the regions and provinces.
In the final analysis the two visions come down to one basic question: should Iraq be one federal state with the federal power acting as the core of this state, or should it turn into an entity made up of confederated regions, each acting as a state in its own right.
This is a question that the foggy and opaque constitution of 2005 did not answer clearly because had it sought to provide such an answer, there wouldn’t have been a constitution at all in the first place, in the absence of a consensus on what Iraq post-2003 should be like.
Not surprisingly, the emergence of the two opposed 2011 versions of the OGL have taken us back to square one, i.e. back to the 2006-2007 horse-trading among the parties – with the indispensable American hand as revealed by the wikileaks oil files – and where the talk is again about political compromises, or as Shafiq puts it “you scratch my back, I scratch yours”. The danger in the current beauty contest among the three major actors (Kurds, Iraqia and Maliki) is that the fate of the country and with it the long term national interest would be sacrificed for the sake of short term political and partisan gains.