Arbil, September 18: US Vice President Joe Biden arrived in the Kurdish regional capital of Arbil on Thursday to push Iraqi leaders for progress on stalled legislation ahead of parliamentary elections in January.
A long-awaited hydrocarbons law, intended to open up the Iraqi oil and gas sector and establish a framework for sharing revenues, remains some way off and jockeying ahead of the January polls has hampered movement, Biden said.
He said earlier that the upcoming elections were “critical to Iraq’s future”, and also met with American soldiers at a military base outside Baghdad, posing for pictures with his arms around their shoulders.
“In truth, some of the more difficult problems are more difficult to solve in an elections cycle,” Biden said while in Baghdad on Thursday.
He raised the issue of the oil law in his talks there with senior Iraqi leaders, including Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki.
He was to deliver the same message in meetings with Kurdish leaders in the north of the country, where he arrived Thursday afternoon, a senior US official said.
Early passage of the legislation was “in the best interest of the country,” added the official, asking not to be named.
Biden also urged Iraq to offer more generous terms at its next auction for oil concessions.
He “made clear that the next round of bidding on oil concessions should be made on more generous terms to attract more outside interest,” the official said.
“Only one of eight deals up for bidding earlier this year was taken,” he said, referring to Iraq’s first tender offer in four decades last June that saw investors snub all but one of the contracts on offer.
The official said that “even one other deal would mean 50 to 60 billion dollars in additional investment in Iraq, 600 million dollars in additional annual revenue, and tens of thousands of additional jobs.
“Ultimately, in our judgment, it’s in the interest of every Iraqi to accept a smaller piece of a much bigger pie.”
The second round of bidding for Iraq’s oil contracts is due to take place in the first half of December.
In June, British energy giant BP and China’s CNPC International Ltd were the only companies to win a bid. They accepted two dollars per barrel to work jointly in the giant Rumaila oil field in southern Iraq.
Biden welcomed the lack of sectarian reprisals after deadly bombings in Baghdad last month, saying it was “a mark of real maturation” of the Iraqi people and government.
He said a proposed referendum on changing the Iraq-US security agreement to bring forward the deadline for the withdrawal of US forces by a year to 2010 was still some way off.
But he added: “Whatever the Iraqi people decide we will abide by it.”
On Afghanistan, he said it was still “very premature” to decide on sending additional resources given that the full contingent of troops already approved had yet to arrive.
“There is no decision imminent on additional resources,” he said.
—Agencies