Dartblog

Americans who stateside bemoan the impending Balkanization of Iraq never really had much to complain about. The polka dots and moonbeams Iraq, where everyone loves his neighbor and the nation is one, never really existed organically. For the last century, Iraq was held together through tyranny of one stripe or another. The Ottoman empire first ruled sovereign over the territory, until its downfall. The League of Nations, after World War One, simple gave the nation to the Britons as “the Mesopotamian Mandate.” Iraq was in time granted independence, but quickly came under the rule of a monarchy called the Hashemites. And then, of course, a series of military coups beginning in 1958 eventually brought Saddam Hussein to power. One more coup left Saddam hanging from a rope and put the resources of the world’s mightiest nation towards erecting, for the first time in anyone’s memory, a hale, self-congealing, free Iraq.

So our task is complex, costly, and quite novel. There are signs of success. The most encouraging comes from an AP wire report written by Robert Reid and released two days ago: “Iraqi Cabinet Approves Draft Oil Law.”

It should come as no surprise that, since industrialization, the principle destabilizing factor in Iraq has been its oil lode. The sectarianism fomented by Hussein’s thirty year reign—during which Sunnis were favored, Shia were spurned, and Kurds were killed—forced Iraqis into a mindset that said: Whichever clique controls the oil territories controls Iraq. So control the oil territories.

Iraqis, now, are changing the way they see things. Far from civil war, there is news that politicians of all the religious sects have come together to institute an oil-sharing program:

“The draft law represents a major breakthrough for Iraq’s economic and political transition,” said Deputy Prime Minister Brahma Sale, a Kurd. “I very much hope the main political groups will rise to the occasion” and approve the bill in parliament.

Iraq has some of the world’s largest petroleum reserves, and supporters hope the legislation will encourage major oil companies to invest billions - if the security situation improves.

Under the measure, revenues will be distributed to all 18 provinces based on population size - a concession to the Sunnis whose central and western homeland has relatively few proven reserves. Most of Iraq’s oil is in the Kurdish north and Shiite south, and many Sunnis fear they would be cut out of a fair share.

They’ll now have a fair share. Forcibly dividing oil intake is not, of course, something that would fly in America. But, unlike the seperately-interested polemicists who have decried President Bush’s “exportation of American-style democracy,” sober planners within the administration know that a ruthlessly equal, entirely transparent division of the land’s black gold is prerequisite to a stable Iraqi democracy. That the cabinet agreed on the language for a bill is a great leap forward.