.... The government of Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki, the Bush administration, and some very big international oil companies, including Chevron, Royal Dutch Shell, BHP Billiton and Total.
Shell, while it is negotiating a services contract to increase production from the giant Kirkuk oil field in northern Iraq, is also negotiating jointly with Australia's BHP for the development of the Missan oilfield in the south.
Chevron and Total jointly are negotiating the giant West Qurna Stage One oilfield development, also in southern Iraq.
The impact on Maliki and President George Bush of the failed military offensive last month is apparent.
Maliki, who traveled to Basra to personally direct the assault in what he called the "decisive and final battle" against the Mahdi Army, the militia loyal to rebel Shi'ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, oversaw what was supposed to be a carefully planned, overwhelming offensive stall, sputter and eventually approach the brink of collapse before US and British forces came to his rescue. What little political authority Maliki had before the campaign seems in danger of totally evaporating in its aftermath.
Bush, for his part, faced the double humiliation of not only seeing the military campaign come undone so quickly -- after what he had quickly called "a defining moment in the history of a free Iraq" -- but then have to watch from the sidelines as the ceasefire that began on March 30 was brokered in Iran, demonstrating yet again that the Islamic Republic ultimately has more influence on the major players in Iraq than does Washington.
But the international oil companies were also big losers in the wake of the fighting. The outlook for entering southern Iraq's upstream oil sector was not particularly rosy to begin with.
For starters, there is the molasses-like contract negotiations that have been held in Amman, Jordan, and which have failed so far to produce even technical services agreements that would allow the companies to dip their collective toes in the deep pool of oil in southern Iraq.
And then there is the ongoing failure of Iraqi legislators, despite repeated assurances from Iraqi officials and persistent cajoling from the Bush administration, to break a years-long impasse on an underlying hydrocarbons law that would provide a secure legal framework from which the foreign oil companies could operate.
Iraqi legislators are again talking confidently of compromises and an end to the sectarian deadlock over the law, but they have made the same sounds many times before, so skepticism should remain the rational response.
The outcome of the Basra fight, however, has raised the barrier far higher than either of the other two obstacles. That's because, as significant as successful results of contract negotiations or a legal framework are in their own right, and no matter what pieces of paper are eventually signed between the companies and Iraq or what law Iraqi legislators finally agree to in the relative safety of Baghdad's Green Zone, the debacle of last month's military campaign will reverberate for some time to come.
The military failure demonstrated again -- had anyone been lulled to a peaceful state by the recent semi-calm -- what is the fractured reality of Iraq.
And that reality means that foreign oil companies are not about to actually risk man and machine in a vast area that is still under the effective domination of a web of rival Shi'ite militias and criminal gangs, no matter how lucrative the resource prize, no matter what is written down on paper.
Shell Chief Executive Jeroen van der Veer acknowledged as much earlier this month during a speech to a conference in Washington. Van der Veer noted that while Shell "is very much prepared to go back to Iraq," the company's crews will "need the ability to work safely" before the company would think of sending them into the country.
Southern Iraq is no more safe now for foreign oil operators than it has been in the years since 2003. And it is a curious turning of events that has kept it so.
Prior to the American-led invasion of Iraq in March of that year, Washington and its ally Britain created a no-fly zone that prevented Saddam Hussein from using his air force to attack the Shi'ites of the south. Now, five years later, those same Iraqi Shi'ites have created their own no-go zone, one that US, British and other foreign oil companies would dare enter only at their own extreme risk.
With Iraq's military unable or unwilling to alter that situation, oil companies, despite being increasingly pressed to find replacement oil reserves for their portfolios, will remain on the outside, looking in.
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