Iraq’s considerable oil resources serve as both a blessing and a curse for the country. As the only significant Iraqi export, oil offers wealth and the means to achieve what everyone aspires to: development, modernity and freedom from want. Kurdistan Regional Government Minister of Natural Resources Ashti Hawrami recently remarked “If you implement the revenue sharing -- when everybody feels he’s an Iraqi and getting part of the wealth that he deserves -- that will unite Iraq; that will create the new security for Iraq and remove the tensions that everyone is scared of.”

Just as shared wealth could hold the country together, however, greed can pull it the other way. The Kurds know very well the curse that oil offers, of course, as Saddam and others built palace after palace and bought whatever weaponry they wanted with the country’s oil wealth. The greed encouraged authoritarianism and raised the stakes for controlling Baghdad, while the weapons purchased with oil money saw use suppressing Kurdistan year after year. Eager to invest in or purchase Iraqi oil, foreign powers coddled dictators who would deal with them and subverted governments that wouldn’t.

Ashti Hawrami, after his remark about how revenue sharing could unite Iraq, added that without an Erbil-Baghdad agreement on a hydrocarbons law, “I don’t know what Iraq means. Iraq means fairness. Fairness means revenue sharing, because that is what we have that binds us, as Iraqis, together.” Of course, Iraq is in a sad state if all that binds its people together is oil revenue sharing. Since Arab Iraqis do seem to have developed a strong sense of Iraqi identity (Shiite Arabs never rose up en masse to support Iran during the Iran-Iraq war, for instance), Minister Hawrami’s statement better reflects Kurdish attachment to the Iraqi state. The view shouldn’t be too hard to understand, given the painful history of massacres, exclusion and repression that Kurds suffered in pre-2003 Iraq.

The ongoing disagreement over oil between Baghdad and Erbil threatens to sunder the country, however, and also relates to the disputed territories – which happen to lie above many of the country’s biggest oil deposits. The Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) accepts the principle of oil revenue sharing amongst all Iraqis, including for new fields discovered in Kurdistan. However, the KRG does not accept the notion that authorities in Baghdad should wield sole and exclusive authority over the awarding of all oil contracts, including those in Kurdistan, and the managing of oil exploration and extraction activities. The Iraqi Constitution simply does not give the federal government such authority, and the KRG a few years ago even contracted an expert legal opinion on the issue from a well known British expert on international law. He supported their interpretation of the Constitution.

To give the government in Baghdad full control over all aspects of the oil industry invites both corruption and a dangerous concentration of power – for those who control Iraq’s purse strings control Iraq. There’s a bad precedent for this kind of arrangement in Iraq – eighty years of bad precedent, in fact. From the Kurdish perspective, if they control oil operations in their territory, they can at least turn off the tap if authorities in Baghdad fail to respect the revenue sharing agreement. Because the Kurds must export their oil via the Iraqi national pipeline (or most of it, at least), Baghdad also keeps the Kurdistan Region dependent on it for its budged and revenue.

That’s why the recent visit of Turkey’s Minister of Energy, Taner Yildiz, to Erbil carries with it a great deal of importance. Just as Turkey’s relations with Maliki deteriorate, its rapport with the KRG improves. Minister Yildiz along with KRG Minister Hawrami announced last week that Turkey would pursue a joint venture with the Iraqi Kurds to refine Kurdistan Region produced oil in Turkey. They also announced plans to build a pipeline from the Iraqi Kurdish Region directly to Turkey, bypassing Iraq’s national oil pipeline.

This, along with Exxon’s recent deal with the KRG to explore for oil there and in the disputed territories, should come as something of bombshell for Baghdad. It lays the framework for Kurdish independence from Iraq, and Nuri al-Maliki, Hussein Sharistani and Abdul Karim Luaibi will have no one to blame but themselves. If they hadn’t broken their promises on Article 140, if they hadn’t tried to monopolize all control over every aspect of the oil industry, the Kurds would not have turned to Turkey the way they are doing now. In a relatively short time, Iraqi Kurds may no longer be dependent on Baghdad for their oil exports or budget. With an estimated capacity of some 2 million barrels a day by 2019, the Kurdish region will be able to export close the present amount that all of Iraq exports. And as Turkey feels an increasingly pressing need to diversify its oil and gas imports from their current dependence on Russia and Iran, the Iraqi Kurds offer them a friendly and easily accessible business relationship.

If I were running the government in Baghdad, I would feel an increased urgency to settle on a hydrocarbons law and make a compromise deal on the disputed territories and Article 140. Otherwise, new developments might outpace the Iraqi government’s ability to negotiate.