Iraq asked Iran on 19 August for special consideration for its own oil exports through the Strait of Hormuz, Anadolu reported, citing the state-run Iraqi News Agency. Iraqi Parliament Speaker Haibat al-Halbousi raised it with Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, speaker of Iran's Majlis (the Iranian Parliament), during Ghalibaf's visit to Baghdad.1 The Anadolu report gives no Iranian response and no terms.
Iraq loads its southern crude at Gulf terminals inside the strait, which is why a transit question reaches Baghdad as a revenue question. The request travelled through the legislatures rather than the oil ministries. A speaker-to-speaker approach is deniable in a way a ministerial one is not, and it can be made without a cabinet committing to anything in writing.
A neighbour asking Tehran for a carve-out concedes the premise the rest of the region has spent months contesting, which is that passage is Iran's to grant. Ghalibaf told Parliament's security commission on 16 August that Iran had won the war. An approach bargaining bilaterally for Iraqi barrels, rather than collectively for a reopening, treats that claim as a working assumption.
Every request of this kind raises the price of the collective one. Tehran now has something to trade that it did not previously have to concede, and it can dispense the same favour twice on different terms.
