Lord Voldemort will not be pleased

After all, this is why we've wasted all our military and treasury in Iraq in the first place:

... last month, more than 100 Iraqi oil experts, economists and legal scholars criticized the proposed legislation and urged the Iraqi parliament to put it on hold.

The most vocal opposition to the oil framework has come from Iraq's influential oil workers' unions. Hassan Jumaa Awaad, president of the Iraqi Oil Workers union, called the proposed hydrocarbon laws "more political than economic" and "unbalanced and incoherent," and said they threatened "to set governorate against governorate and region against region." Iraq's oil unions have threatened to "mutiny" if the law is passed as drafted.

In favor of the laws are the multinational energy companies who stand to gain tens of billions more profits in Iraq than they could expect from any other major oil producer's reserves. They're supported by Iraqi separatists -- especially Shias in the South and Northern Kurds -- who want control over the country's oil to rest in the hands of the regional authorities they dominate. They include Iraq's prime minister, Nouri Al-Maliki, and its president, Jalal Talabani.

Faced with such broad and intense opposition to a set of laws that were effectively crafted in Washington, London and Houston, the Iraqi government and the U.S. authorities in Baghdad have kept Iraqis in the dark over the details of the proposed legislation, brought all manner of pressure on lawmakers and, when that failed, used heavy-handed coercion to move the legislation forward.

According to the poll released this week, more than three out of four Iraqis -- including nine of 10 Sunni Arabs -- say "the level of information provided by the Iraqi government on this law" was not adequate for them to "feel informed" about the issue. Only 4 percent of Iraqis feel they've been given "totally adequate" information about the oil law.