By F. William Engdahl
January 16,
2020 "Information
Clearing House" -
By the series of actions in recent months in
Iraq and across the Middle East, Washington
has forced a strategic shift towards China
and to an extent Russia and away from the
United States. If events continue on the
present trajectory it can well be that a
main reason that Washington backed the
destabilization of Assad in Syria, to block
a planned Iran-Iraq-Syria gas pipeline, will
now happen, short of Washington initiating a
full scorched earth politics in the region.
This is what we can call unintended
consequences.
If nature abhors a
vacuum, so too does geopolitics. When
President Trump months ago announced plans
to pull US troops out of Syria and the
Middle East generally, Russia and especially
China began quietly to intensify contacts
with key states in the region.
Chinese involvement with
Iraqi oil development and other
infrastructure projects, though large, was
significantly disrupted by the ISIS
occupation of some one third of Iraqi
territory. In September, 2019 Washington
demanded that Iraq pay for completion of key
infrastructure projects destroyed by the
ISIS war– a war where Washington as well as
Ankara, Israel and Saudi Arabia played the
key hidden role—by giving the US government
50% of Iraqi oil revenues, an outrageous
demand to put it politely.
Iraq China Pivot
Iraq refused. Instead
Iraqi Prime Minister Adel Abdul-Mahdi went
to Beijing as head of a 55-member delegation
to discuss Chinese involvement in the
rebuilding of Iraq. This visit did not go
unnoticed in Washington. Even before that,
Iraqi-China ties were significant. China was
Iraq’s number one trading partner and Iraq
was China’s third-leading source of oil
after Saudi Arabia and Russia. In April 2019
in Baghdad, China’s Deputy Minister of
Foreign Relations Lee Joon said China was
ready to contribute to Iraq’s
reconstruction.
For Abdul-Mahdi the
Beijing trip was a major success; he called
it a “quantum jump” in relations. The visit
saw the signing of eight wide-ranging
memoranda of understanding (MoUs), a
framework credit agreement, and the
announcement of plans for Iraq to join
China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). It
included Chinese involvement in rebuilding
Iraq’s infrastructure as well as developing
Iraqi oilfields. For both countries an
apparent “win-win” as the Chinese like to
say.
