The Collapse of Iraq's Oil Deal

Fester analyzes the bad news:

The Sunni Arabs who are opposed to decentralized control of oil and more importantly its revenue will continue to exercise their veto over Kurdish oil exports. This veto is the Semtex derived veto of blowing up critical nodes on the northern oil export networks. Developing new fields does nothing for the Kurds if that new oil is sitting in storage tanks in Irbil. It could be shipped overland by truck, but this is a fairly expensive method.

The Shi'ite parties in my opinion, really just need to have enough of an illusion of progress to keep the US Army and Marines interested in acting as their anti-Sunni militia. The draft oil law is fundamentally irrelevant to any of the major Shi'ite parties until the southern intra-Shi'ite resource and network fight reaches a definitive conclusion. And at that point, even if there is a pre-existing law in place governing resource and cash distribution, the winning groups in the South will control either the export terminals or at least the accountants, so Baghdad will get what the Southern winner wants them to get, and not a whole lot more than that.