Hussein al-Shahristani, Iraq's deputy prime minister, threatened legal action against firms that purchased "smuggled oil" via the Turkish-KRG arrangements; he accused Turkey of "greed" and trying "to lay (its) hands on cheap Iraqi oil.
Baghdad filed for arbitration against Turkey's state-owned pipeline operator BOTAS with the International Court of Arbitration of the International Chamber of Commerce in Paris.
Baghdad says those Turkish-KRG arrangements are illegal and unconstitutional, but its own contract awarding is also unlawful. Should a change of guard occur in Baghdad, al-Maliki and his government would be held accountable and probably prosecuted.
The dispute between Baghdad on the one hand and Turkey and the KRG on the other is only the surfacing tip of the iceberg of the "gold rush--style" looting of Iraq's national wealth.
One of the main priorities of al-Maliki all along has been to legalize the de-nationalization and privatization process.
Muttitt, author of Fuel on the Fire: Oil and Politics in Occupied Iraq, wrote a few months before al-Maliki assumed his first premiership that American and British governments made sure the candidates for prime minister knew what their first priority had to be: To pass a law legalizing the return of the foreign multinationals. This would be the vital biggest prize of the U.S. 2003 invasion.
Al-Maliki is the right man to secure a pro-privatization government in Baghdad. Thomas L. Friedman described him in the New York Times on this June 4 as "our guy," "an American-installed autocrat" and a "big gift" the U.S. occupation "left behind in Iraq."
Various drafts of hydrocarbon privatization laws failed to gain consensus among the proxy sectarian parties to the U.S.-engineered "political process" and the "federal" entities of Iraq's U.S.-drafted constitution.
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