This in turn relates to the politics behind the move to introduce a parliamentary version of the oil and gas bill. Interestingly, the Kurds and Iraqiyya are seen as the driving forces behind the new bill, whereas resistance to it has been recorded above all by the State of Law alliance headed by Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki. That clearly explains the stronger role for parliament in appointing the commission in their version of the bill, as well as the resistance to the bill on both substantial and procedural grounds by State of Law. One interesting feature is that the Kurds are now moving ahead with a bill that will give the central commission veto right over all contracts: It is believed disagreement between the Kurds and Shiite Islamists has been a key reason for the delay in presenting the government version of the bill to parliament.
Perhaps more than anything, the parliamentary version of the bill illustrates the length to which Iraqiyya is prepared to go in order to hurt Maliki personally, no matter what the ideological issues at hand are. Here we have a draft law that was almost uniformly rejected by Iraqi oil experts – mostly Iraqiyya supporters – when it first appeared in 2007. The essence of the law remains pretty much the same, but now Iraqiyya are lending their support to a project that will reduce the ministry of oil to a chamber of pontification and put all real power in the hands of a commission of politicians and a few “independent experts”.
For their part, the Kurds are significantly conceding veto rights over contracts to a centrally politically commission, albeit one with a parliamentary mandate as well as a two-thirds requirement for reaching decisions. But the wider point must be this: The Kurds have managed to persuade Iraqiyya to back yet another commission of politicians at the expense of bureaucrats. The conceptual cousin of the oil and gas commission is of course the national council for high policies, backed by Iraqiyya and the Kurds as well and resisted by Maliki. To an outside observer they both look pretty much like the products of a political science kindergarten, and it is remarkable how the Kurds have managed to convert Iraqiyya with its supposedly Bonapartist ideals to a position that may well contribute to ever greater fragmentation. To add insult to injury, Iraqiyya claim to be “building the institutions of the state”! The only player on the Iraqi scene that seems focused on normal, recognisable state institutions right now is clearly Nuri al-Maliki, but the failure of the two camps to communicate runs the risk of creating growing polarisation and with it a vicious cycle of ever more authoritarianism on the part of Maliki.
It is also interesting that the Kurds in this case are working through parliament (and its speaker, Usama al-Nujayfi of Iraqiiya) rather than through the presidency and their own Jalal Talabani (who introduced the strategic policy council bill). Could it be that some kind of Talabani-Barzani disagreement on how to navigate between Iraqiyya and Maliki is lingering in the background in this case?
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