HOW often does it happen: Little things foretelling bigger things. The rule of thumb is to never discount the role of the former. The Iranian takeover of an oil well in Iraq might show how one thing could lead to another.
The takeover — which Iraq says included planting an Iranian flag on the well — was met by protests, not force, from Baghdad and an emergency meeting of Iraq’s National Security Council that denounced it as a gross violation of Iraqi sovereignty.
But it was all strong language in Baghdad though Iraq called for calm and for a peaceful solution, “far from any military escalation.” That the Iranian forces have withdrawn from the Fakkah field shows that Iraq was right in reacting the way it did. But the Iranians are still nearby.
The Fakkah field, 300 km southeast of Baghdad, and 300 meters inside Iraq, is considered a shared field between Iran and Iraq, meaning both nations are able to pump oil from it, but the immediate problem is the insistency on either side that well No. 4 is theirs. Iraq says the well is clearly in Iraqi territory; Iran says the oil well was part of Iranian territory according to a 1975 border agreement. Apparently there was an agreement between the oil ministers of the two countries to settle the dispute but like so many issues in the region, it was left to fester.
So Iran denies having violated Iraq’s sovereignty while Iraq is demanding that the Iranians leave immediately.
Although Iraqi troops have reportedly massed near the oil well in a standoff with Iranian forces, thankfully, there has been no violence and the hope is that it will be resolved through peaceful diplomacy between the two governments. Any other way would be foolhardy. But cases such as these sometimes suddenly snowball if not dealt with swiftly.
How calm things remain depends to a great extent on the relationship as a whole. Iraq-Iran ties have strengthened since the new government took over in Baghdad and after the fall of Saddam Hussein. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad then became the first Iranian president to visit Iraq since Iran’s 1979 revolution. Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri Al-Maliki makes frequent visits, as does President Jalal Talabani. And both countries these days have Shiite-led governments.
But in the shadows is the countries’ bloody eight-year war in the 1980s that killed up to one million people. The war ended in 1988 with a cease-fire, no clear victor and parts of the border under dispute. The Fakkah field dispute is one such offshoot of the conflict. Fakkah has shown anew the need for more clearly defined borders.
It is too early to say whether the incident would mushroom into greater tension. Baghdad refrained from taking any military action and stressed it would seek a measured, diplomatic response to the situation. Iraq did well not to give a deadline for an Iranian withdrawal and not to say what it would do if Tehran failed to comply.
