Iraq?

The tentative deal that OPEC cooked up this week was bound to fail, but not by the country that I assumed. It looks like it will be undone by Iraq of all countries. At the meeting OPEC rolled out their numbers showing how much all the member countries were producing. And will use those number to determine how much each country will need to cut production by. Well Iraq is now taking offense to those numbers, saying that their output was underestimated by some 200k to 400k barrels per day. Those are big numbers if true and if Iraq is told to roll back to where OPEC wants them to be, that could be almost a half million barrels a day of production that would need to be shelved. This has the secondary effect of other member countries saying that their numbers were low balled as well, starting a chain reaction that undoes everything. It will be interesting to see how this plays out. If a back door deal with Iraq will happen, or the whole deal falls apart like is expected. Either way, this shows that OPEC is nowhere near the cohesive force that it once was and the Sauds no longer have the control they once had.