BAGHDAD: This week’s passage of an oil law in Iraq has started people thinking: some good news at last. Like flacks the world over, Coalition press officers are forever reminding us that we continually give short shrift to, or even just ignore, good news. So here goes. The Iraqi Parliament on Tuesday approved a draft oil law that establishes an equitable distribution of the country’s oil wealth, third largest in the world, based essentially on a per-capita formula. That’s huge. There’s hardly anything like it anywhere in the world, and certainly not in the neighborhood. The gulf satrapies divvy up the proceeds among their ruling families and offer generous welfare packages to their people, but hardly equitable ones; there are huge numbers of very poor people in Saudi Arabia, for instance. And the Iraqis managed to draft the law in remarkably short order. It still has to go to Parliament, but a mixed committee of Sunnis, Shias and Kurds have signed off on it. “Everyone is happy about it,” said Vice President Tareq al-Hashemi. The fundamental problem in Iraq, and one that underlies the sectarian conflict, is that the oil is not distributed throughout the country, but lies mostly in the Shiite far south and in the Kurdish north or in Kirkuk, a disputed city, ethnicitywise. The Sunnis who long ruled the country until Saddam’s fall, and who husband the antigovernment insurgency now, have no proven oil reserves in areas where they predominate; Anbar is a desert, above and below ground. “This removes the points of objection from those who oppose the political process,” said Sheikh Humam al-Hamoudi, head of the Parliament’s foreign-affairs committee, as well as its constitutional-review committee. In order to get agreement on a constitution, Iraqis just left out the thorny issue of sharing the oil wealth, hence the need for a law now.
The draft law still has to be approved by Parliament, where there will no doubt be some wrangling, which could also degenerate into sectarianism, but Hashemi says they’ve pretty much hashed out their differences in advance, so it should go through. And there is a bit of a problem of how to control the rampant smuggling of oil by militias in the south and the north–smuggling so widespread that it requires collusion by the authorities, since it involves not only tanker trucks but even ships, and might well undermine a realistic division of spoils. And the regions of Iraq will get the right to sell oil-development rights to private companies, although that right will be subject to review by a central government body–but the nature of that review is controversially vague and will likely remain so. And in order to have a per-capita sharing of the wealth, it’s necessary to first know how many capiti there are in the country. Since there hasn’t been a census in Iraq in 30 years, that may be a problem, especially since the Sunnis all labor under the delusion that they’re much more per capitus than they actually are and can therefore be expected to resist another census–tooth, nail and car bomb. Shias have a much higher birth rate, which I’ve actually heard some Sunnis describe as a form of demographic genocide. There’s also the problem of corruption, which was a breathtaking problem even under United Nations oversight when Iraqis managed to suborn international diplomats willing to sell out an oil-for-food program meant to keep children from going hungry, so you can imagine how that will go once left entirely to indigenous devices.
But stop, I’m getting carried away: this is supposed to be about good news. OK, so here’s some more: execution-style sectarian killings are down, way down, although there are still 20 people a day or so who end up bound and shot in the back of the head and laid out on a slab in the morgue. And while that sort of killing has decreased, terrorist bombings and Sunni-extremist-style executions have made up the shortfall. “Killing and kidnapping is reduced, but bombings are way up,” says Human Rights Minister Wijdan Salim. In just the past week, suicide bombers and car bombers (the park-and-flee type) have struck a soccer field, a couple marketplaces, a police station, a school, a car dealership and a wedding party. Insurgents have kidnapped 18 policemen, displayed them alive on an insurgent Web site, and then dumped 14 of them dead in Diyala. Overall, while sectarian killings of the cuffed and head-shot variety dropped by the hundreds, the February body count of 1,500 civilians was only slightly down from January. “For every good thing that happens,” says Salim, “it’s balanced by something bad.”–Rod Nordland
