It's Time to Withdraw Iraq's Oil Law

Iraq's citizens suffer from the August heat, little electricity and fuel. Death is seemingly around every corner. So the time may not be right for an oil law, especially the one the Bush administration wants.

United Press International has found a recurring theme over recent months during coverage of the Iraq oil law: creating a law governing the bloodline to Iraq's economy should be less of a priority than stopping the bloodletting of Iraq's citizens.

"There is no hurry whatsoever," said Muhammad-Ali Zainy, senior energy economist and analyst at the London-based Center for Global Energy Studies. "Iraq really, now, is bleeding and losing its people in this horrible way and there is terrorism and all that and lack of the provisional basic services.

"Everything bad, there is in Iraq. Why should the government leave all these urgent needs to be addressed and then go to the hydrocarbon law?"

The Bush administration has focused on Iraq's oil since at least 2001. Remodeling the nationalized oil sector has been part of the U.S. occupation's effort to rework Iraq's economy overall. Washington has pushed the oil law because it views it as legislative and economic progress. And President Bush, as well as Congress, included the oil law as a benchmark for Iraq's government, supposedly marking success and reconciliation.

But the law is but one of many factors splitting Iraq's government. Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's governing coalition is threatened by defections and internal strife, mostly over its inability to find compromise with Sunnis and halt the increase in violence and downward-spiraling quality of life.

For average citizens, there is little to no regular electricity, and they stand in hours-long lines to buy transportation, heating and cooking fuels in temperatures that average well above 100 degrees in summer. There's a countrywide fuel shortage and, with average unemployment reaching past 60 percent, mass poverty.

Most Iraqis don't have access to potable water, according to the United Nations, thus waterborne illnesses are on the rise in a country with an overburdened hospital system. To put an infrastructure problem in American terms, since 2003 Iraqis have already experienced devastating bridge collapses that eclipse last week's in Minnesota.

And, every day in Iraq, there are a number of Virginia Tech-grade massacres. A third more Iraqi civilians died in July than June, according to the Iraqi government; at least 81 U.S. troops were killed last month -- nearly double July 2006.

"There are certain priorities that one must look at," said former Iraq Oil Minister Issam al-Chalabi, now living in Amman, Jordan. "The situation is so chaotic, people there -- nobody can even walk on the streets. Forget about what you've been told by the press, by the media, by the government, by the United States.

"But we're talking about what the people are seeing with their own eyes in a country that people are afraid to send their children to school, people are afraid to go to work, hundreds of Iraqis are being killed every day.

"What's so important about issuing a law that cannot even be implemented?" Chalabi asked.

He is a leader in a coalition of Iraqi oil, economic and legal experts opposing the current manifestation of the law.

Tariq Shafiq, an Iraqi hired in early 2006 to help write the oil law, now opposes it because he says it weakens the central government. And, he fears, a decentralized oil sector will lead to unnecessary exploration and mismanagement of production to the detriment of Iraq, which last year funded more than 93 percent of the federal budget with oil revenue.

The legislation, having been in negotiations for more than a year, is now stuck in Parliament's Energy Committee. Seventy-six percent of Iraqis 18 years and older say their government has provided either "totally inadequate" or "somewhat inadequate" information on the law, according to a poll of 2,200 Iraqis in all 18 provinces conducted in June and July by KA Research.