At the request of the U.S. State Department, [USAID] is providing a petroleum advisor to Iraq from February to June through its contract with BearingPoint, USAID spokesman David Snider told Dow Jones Newswires in an e-mail.
"The advisor will be providing legal and regulatory advice in drafting the framework of petroleum and other energy-related legislation, including foreign investment," he wrote.
IRAQ: USAID Provides Adviser to Iraq Government on Oil Law, CorpWatch, April 28th, 2006
Somehow the various Iraqi parties don’t seem impressed by the draft product Bearing Point delivered. This is a slow non-stop merry-go-round …
Iraq cabinet approves draft oil law, IHT, February 26, 2007
The Iraqi cabinet approved a draft of a law Monday that would set guidelines for countrywide distribution of oil revenues and foreign investment in the immense oil industry.
The endorsement was a major agreement of the country’s ethnic and sectarian political blocs on one of Iraq’s most divisive issues.
Yes, it was a great success. But then why, five month later, are we reading the same headline again?
Iraqi cabinet backs draft oil law, BBC, July 3, 2007
The Iraqi government has approved an amended draft law on how to share the country’s oil wealth, officials say.
Government spokesman Ali al-Dabbagh said parliament would begin debating the bill on Wednesday.
Is everything fine now? Certainly not:
Iraq oil law timeline unsure, UPI, July 2, 2007
Iraqi oil law negotiators are unsure when they’ll reach a compromise on which oil fields the federal or regional governments will control.
"We hope that very soon, definitely within coming months, one or two months from now," Thamir Ghadhban, energy adviser to Iraq’s prime minister, told reporters …
[…]
Negotiators from the Kurdistan Regional Government and Baghdad last week approved a companion law dictating how revenue from oil sales would be split among the federal and local governments, a major breakthrough in talks ongoing for nearly a year. That law, as well as the oil law and bills governing the Ministry of Oil and Iraq National Oil Co., need approval of the council of ministers and Parliament before they are official.Ashti Hawrami, KRG’s natural resources minister and lead negotiator, told UPI this week via mobile phone from Iraq that with the revenue sharing law out of the way the oil law will come back to the front burner.
"We sort of are getting back now to reviewing the draft law and annexes, so it will take some time," he said.
Ghadhban, Hawrami’s federal government equivalent at the talks, however, said the question on field control will instead be decided by a council that decides the country’s oil policy, per language in the draft oil law.
"So we don’t have any more problem called annexes," he said.
There are multiple laws with several annexes that need to be passed to allow any legal certainty for investment in Iraqi oil. The central oil-law, the revenue-sharing law, the laws governing the central institutions to manage the oil reserves and industry. The media always mixes these up. Not one of these laws has passed the parliament and it is unlikely that any will.
Some central questions, as the "field control" mentioned above, have now been pushed outside of the law to be later fought over within committees.
Some years from now, there might be a legal environment for Iraqi oil riches. But it is not going to happen during Bush’s time and the time of the current Congress.
What are the consequences now of missing this "benchmark" demanded by Congress?