Iraqi Oil Deal Disintegrating?

Some discouraging news from 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 here.

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 had broken out in recent days between Hussain al-Shahristani, the Iraqi oil minister, and officials of the provincial government in the Kurdish north, where some of the nation’s largest fields are located.

Mr. 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 Mr. Shahristani says is illegal. Many of the Sunnis who supported the original deal have also 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 that 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 Salih, 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,” said Mr. Salih, who is Kurdish. “There were occasions where we seemed to be there, where we seemed to have closure, only to fail at that.”

“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.

This isn't a good thing, but it may not be as catastrophic as some commentators seem to think. After all, this is a legislative battle, not a military one. This sort of compromise will be perpetually necessary if the Iraqi government is to generate and sustain any sort of legitimacy. The fact that the sides seem pretty close to a deal, and in fact had a tentative agreement in place, points positively to the fact that negotiations are taking place. The negative aspect, of course, is that these negotiations have not led to any legislation at this point. But the same could be said of the recent U.S. immigration battles, or Congress' inability to pass resolutions asking the President to withdraw combat troops from Iraq, or any number of other pieces of legislation that ended up DOA.

This is the nitty-gritty of representative democracies. This is a real and substantive test of the strength and validity of the Iraqi government. If they can eventually produce an oil-sharing agreement that has broad-based support from all sides, then the government may be on a path towards relevance. If not, then the ballgame is over. But the fact that this is taking a long time doesn't mean that there is no chance for a positive result. The legislative game is slow; reaching agreement takes a lot of time. We should continue to pressure the Iraqis to come to agreement as quickly as they can, but we must do so while recognizing that oil is the most important issue in Iraq, and this is the first experiment with such far-reaching legislation in the nation's history. Realistic expectations are necessary.