Yes, I can address that.
Unfortunately, we sometimes have these misconceptions. We all started studying the Middle East, or at least the people who are old enough, when the peshmerga were considered a formidable military force, and Mustafa Barzani, and all of that, going back all the way to the time of the Shah. That was our preconceived notion. But unfortunately the peshmerga of today are 20, 21, or 23-year-olds who have not had the military experience of their predecessors. This is why even the famed peshmerga were not really in a position to contain the advance of the Islamic State without the air strikes that they called upon.
The Kurdish regional government itself is now behaving de facto as an autonomous entity, and you very correctly pointed to what is the key aspect of this de facto sovereignty, which is the fact that they are able to dictate the terms of energy agreements, something that the central government in Iraq had always prevented previously. But now they're in a position to do that because, even in Baghdad, the people are battling for their lives and so on and so forth, so this is it.
This goes back to the previous dilemma. Certainly, air strikes prove important to steady the nerves on that front, but the Kurdish regional government itself needs to get its act together in terms of military training and military efficiency, because these are not the peshmerga of 20 years ago.