Iraq Oil Report

Plus:
*Iraqi Kurds, Iraqi Arabs, Washington and Ankara square up over the Turkish invasion into northern Iraq
*Kirkuk pipeline to Turkey stops
*Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq challenged in southern provincial strongholds
*Iraq Press Roundup
*Much, much more…

Iraq’s draft oil law is stalled in Parliament, the national government and Kurdistan Regional Government are moving forward with their own deals — unconstitutional, the each says of the other — and Iraq’s oil production is stalled at just more than 2 million barrels per day.

Perhaps it’s a good time to take a step back and recap the debate over Iraq’s oil sector and its possibilities. To do so, United Press International’s Ben Lando has reviewed three recently published documents providing contrasting and varying insight. It’s not exhaustive, but a good addition to an important discussion.

The first is “An Opinion Opposing the Existing Draft Iraqi Oil & Gas Law,” by Fouad al-Amir, a 70-year-old Iraqi resident with “40 years in the Iraqi Ministry of Oil,” according to an ex-Iraqi oil official. …

The Iraq National Accord, a political party led by former Iraq Prime Minister Iyad Allawi, who is angling to replace current Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s governing coalition, has issued a critique of the current process of the oil and gas law, as well as of the national Oil Ministry. …

While the timeline for finding agreement on the oil law is unknown, a new report from the Center for Global Energy Studies says there is much than can, and should, be done to enhance Iraq’s hydrocarbons sector in the meantime.

Read the entire article by Ben Lando. Click HERE.

KRG Prime Minister Nechirvan Barzani said the Iraqi government has been slow in dealing with Turkey’s incursion, he told Asharq Alawsat. He reiterated KRG calls for dialogue, and not military action to route the PKK, the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, which Turkey says uses northern Iraq mountains as bases for attacks inside Turkey.

“As long as the administration in northern Iraq protects the PKK,” Murat Karagoz, first counselor at the Turkish Embassy in Washington, accused the KRG this week, “Turkey will not go into dialogue with local administration in the north.”
He specifically accused Massoud Barzani, President and co-leader of Iraq’s Kurds, of not condemning the PKK and threatening Turkey. “We will not go into dialogue with Barzani,” he said.

Defense Secretary Robert Gates left Ankara Thursday with few public promises that Turkey would limit its offensive, now entering its second week, which is using intelligence from the United States to target the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK. Turkish air and artillery strikes continued Thursday as ground forces sought to destroy bases in the remote, mountainous region of Iraq, Scott Peterson reports for The Christian Science Monitor.

“I measure quick in terms of days, a week or two, something like that, not months,” Mr. Gates said. It was the first time he had demanded a strict timeline for the Turkish operation to end, Richard A. Oppel Jr. and Mark Mazzetti report for The New York Times.

President Bush in a press conference Thursday was less specific, though backing Gates. Turkey should “achieve their objective” but the incursion “shouldn’t be long-lasting.” The two may not, however, be mutually exclusive. This is the 20th something time Turkey has chased the PKK inside northern Iraq, and has had four bases there for a decade, and still the PKK survives and bombs.

Turkish military leaders as well as Turkish papers have reported success in northern Iraq, but how effective has the invasion been? US and Iraqi leaders are impatient, while Kurdish militants have probably melted away, Jürgen Gottschlich reports for Spiegel Online.

America’s Kurds have scheduled 10 protests across the country, including one Friday in front of the U.S. State Department.

From Pop Kek cakes to Mio soap, Turkish products dominate shop shelves in Iraq’s Kurdish north. So even as residents here seethe in anger at Turkey’s big military incursion into their homeland, they cannot afford to cut the economic lifeline with their larger neighbor, Sherko Raouf reports for Reuters. Thousands of Turkish troops crossed a remote part of the border last Thursday to hunt Kurdish PKK rebels who have used mountainous northern Iraq as a base to fight for self-rule in the mainly Kurdish southeast of Turkey since the 1990s. “I want an alternative to Turkish goods, but we’re not a manufacturing region, so we have to import. The closest place is Turkey,” said shopowner Cezar Abdeh in the border town of Zakhu, surrounded by Turk sweets, cosmetics and other imported goods.

The struggle between Kurds and Arabs for control of the city of Kirkuk and its oil amounts to a “ticking time bomb” in northern Iraq, according to the new United Nations envoy trying to broker a settlement, Bill Varner reports for Bloomberg News. Mediator Staffan de Mistura said in an interview that he has about four months left to solve “the mother of all crises” in Iraq. “If that takes place, we will have contributed substantially to avoiding a new conflict at the worst possible time,” he said.

Iraq halted exports of Kirkuk crude through its northern pipeline to Turkey on Wednesday but Iraqi officials said they expected pumping to resume by Friday morning, Reuters reports. An engineer with the Northern Oil Company in Kirkuk blamed a technical fault in a pumping unit for the halt, while a spokesman for the Oil Ministry in Baghdad, Asim Jihad, said it was due to routine maintenance of the pipeline.

This is very likely NOT as a result of the Turkish frustration with Baghdad and Irbil over the PKK, or visa-versa over the Turkish invasion. Both make money when the oil flows and neither are likely to reject it or shut it off, respectively, as punishment.

The provincial powers legislation, approved earlier this month, was rejected Wednesday. Meanwhile there’s talk of a growing unrest in the government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s government, with the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq looking to replace the Dawa Party premier with one of their own.

While ISCI, which receives strong — albeit ironic — support from both the United States and Iran, won big in 2005 provincial council elections, largely due to the boycotts from rival Shiite as well as Sunni parties. The provincial powers law wasn’t an elections law – such a vote and governing structure is long overdue, Iraqis say – but did set a tentative timeline for the next poll, to be Oct. 1. Of course, that’s in the wind now that the Parliament will have to take up the law after the Presidential Council veto.

“The law and especially its provisions for early provincial elections had been resisted by ISCI and the Kurds, who control two of the three seats on the presidential council. The presidency council today emphasised that elections would go ahead on time, but the legislation is nevertheless sent back to parliament, ostensibly to sort out unspecified “constitutional” issues relating to the powers of the governors,” wrote Norwegian Institute of International Affairs research fellow Reidar Visser to his exclusive e-mail list. Visser is also an expert in Iraqi politics and editor of Historiae.org.

ISCI control of Nasiriyah, a southern city in Thi Qar province (many southern provinces are considered ISCI-controlled), is being challenged, Visser writes. “On 25 February, a two-thirds majority of the governorate council decided to dissolve the local security council and transfer its powers to the local police chief instead. … it is taking place in a setting - the provincial council - where no Sadrists are represented because they boycotted the January 2005 local elections. In other words, it is other Shiite Islamist forces, primarily Fadila but probably also at least some members of Daawa (Tanzim al-Iraq) that are behind the move. … Secondly, it is significant that ISCI’s opponents are deciding to strengthen the powers of the local police. This means that the image of full ISCI dominance in the security apparatuses of the south probably requires more nuance. … That could be a result of increased local competition by other local parties asserting themselves in the security apparatus, but it could also be an expression of a conflict between ISCI and parts of the security forces that are more loyal to Nuri al-Maliki (and the central government) than to Abd al-Aziz al-Hakim - two leaders that increasingly have been at odds with each other over the past months.”

Read Iraq’s editorial pages in the Iraq Press Roundup by UPI’s Hiba Dawood.

Iraqi journalists are warning that a new charter agreed by Arab ministers of information will roll back media freedom in the region, Bassim al-Shara reports for the Institute for War & Peace Reporting. The non-binding charter was drafted by Egypt and Saudi Arabia and adopted on February 12, following a meeting of the Arab League member states’ ministers of information in Cairo. Reports suggested that Lebanon and Qatar were the only Arab League members to raise concerns, but the Iraqi government, which did not attend the meeting, said it too opposed the charter. Iraqi media representatives, meanwhile, have slammed the proposed restrictions. “This charter could have been imposed during the era of Saddam’s regime,” agreed Hashim Hassan, a professor at the College of Media at Baghdad University.

U.S.-backed Sunni volunteer forces, which have played a vital role in reducing violence in Iraq, are increasingly frustrated with the American military and the Iraqi government over what they see as a lack of recognition of their growing political clout and insufficient U.S. support, Sudarsan Raghavan and Amit R. Paley reports for The Washington Post. Since Feb. 8, thousands of fighters in restive Diyala province have left their posts in order to pressure the government and its American backers to replace the province’s Shiite police chief. On Wednesday, their leaders warned that they would disband completely if their demands were not met.

Despite its very public saber-rattling against Iran, however, the United States has spent most of the past five years in a de facto alliance with Iran in support of the Shiite-led (and US-installed) regime in Baghdad. The most powerful component of that regime, the Islamic Supreme Robert Dreyfuss reports for The Nation in an article titled: Is Iran Winning the Iraq War? Council of Iraq (ISCI) and its disciplined Badr Corps militia, is also Iran’s closest Iraqi ally. Taking advantage of the political vacuum created by the US destruction of Saddam Hussein’s government, Tehran has established a vast presence, both overt and covert, in Iraq, with enormous influence among nearly all of its western neighbor’s Shiite and Kurdish parties. As a result, the Iraq of 2008 is a tale of two paradoxes.

The Iraq war has cost the US 50-60 times more than the Bush administration predicted and was a central cause of the sub-prime banking crisis threatening the world economy, according to Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz, Peter Wilson reports for The Australian.The former World Bank vice-president yesterday said the war had, so far, cost the US something like $US3trillion ($3.3 trillion) compared with the $US50-$US60-billion predicted in 2003.

The European Union has failed to improve the situation in Iraq despite committing more than €800 million (US$1.2 billion) to reconstruction efforts since 2003, a European Parliament report said Wednesday, The Associated Press reports. The report by the assembly’s foreign affairs committee called for the EU to expand its presence in the country, operate on the ground in the Kurdish region, among others, and boost its operations in Basra and Erbil.

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