What Was I Saying?

Wasn't it something like

Now, one might be worried that having the Kurds make deals with foreign oil companies could undermine efforts to get the central Iraqi government in Baghdad to settle the controversies about a national oil law. A deal like this one seems like it might make it harder to build a coherent nation, and achieve the "victory" that fella in the White House keeps going on about, where a stable, secure, unified Iraq can stand on its own.

Why, yes, I believe it was. Still, I'm sure no one could have predicted this:

BAGHDAD, Sept. 12 — A carefully constructed compromise on a draft law governing Iraq’s rich oil fields, agreed to in February after months of arduous talks among Iraqi political groups, appears to have collapsed. The apparent breakdown comes just as Congress and the White House are struggling to find evidence that there is progress toward reconciliation and a functioning government here.

Senior Iraqi negotiators met in Baghdad on Wednesday in an attempt to salvage the original compromise, two participants said. But the meeting came against the backdrop of a public series of increasingly strident disagreements over the draft law that had broken out in recent days between Hussain al-Shahristani, the Iraqi oil minister, and officials of the provincial government in the Kurdish north, where some of the nation’s largest fields are located.

Mr. Shahristani, a senior member of the Arab Shiite coalition that controls the federal government, negotiated the compromise with leaders of the Kurdish and Arab Sunni parties. But since then, the Kurds have pressed forward with a regional version of the law that Mr. Shahristani says is illegal.