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.
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It
was only a matter of days after the Beijing talks of
Prime Minister Abdul-Mahdi that nationwide protests
against Iraqi government corruption and economic
policies broke out, led by opposition cries that
Abdul-Mahdi resign. Reuters witnessed snipers
carefully fanning the violent protest firing on the
protesters giving the impression of government
repression much as the CIA did in Maidan in Kiev
in February 2014 or in Cairo in 2011.
There is now strong evidence that the China talks
and the timing of the spontaneous October 2019
protests against the Abdul-Mahdi government were
connected. The Trump Administration is the link.
According to a report by Federico Pieraccini,
“Abdul-Medhi made a speech to Parliament speaking
about how the Americans had ruined the country and
now refused to complete infrastructure and
electricity grid projects unless they were promised
50% of oil revenues, which Abdul-Mehdi refused.” He
then quotes sections of Abdul-Mahdi’s speech
translated from Arabic: “This is why I visited China
and signed an important agreement with them to
undertake the construction instead. Upon my return,
Trump called me to ask me to reject this agreement.
When I refused, he threatened to unleash huge
demonstrations against me that would end my
premiership. Huge demonstrations against me duly
materialized and Trump called again to threaten that
if I did not comply with his demands, then he would
have Marine snipers on tall buildings target
protesters and security personnel alike in order to
pressure me. I refused again and handed in my
resignation. To this day the Americans insist on us
rescinding our
deal with the Chinese.”
Now the US assassination of Iranian Major General
Qassem Soleimani, just as he landed in Baghdad
reportedly on a mediation mission with Saudi Arabia
via Abdul-Mahdi, has thrown the entire region into
political chaos amid talk of possible World War III.
The soft Iranian “retaliation” missile firings on US
bases in Iraq and the surprise admission by Teheran
that they accidentally downed a Ukrainian commercial
airline as if left Teheran, all amid reports that
Trump and Rouhani were in back channel secret talks
to calm things down, leave many scratching their
heads as to what is really going on.
Quiet ‘silk’ inroads
One thing is clear. Beijing is looking at its
prospects, along with Russia to replace the
domination of Iraqi politics that Washington has
held since its 2003 war of occupation. OilPrice.com
reports that beginning October just after
Abdul-Mahdi’s successful Beijing talks, Iraq started
exporting 100,000 barrels per day (bpd) of crude oil
to China as part of the 20-year
oil-for-infrastructure deal agreed between the two
countries. According to Iraqi oil ministry sources,
China will build its influence in Iraq by beginning
with oil and gas investments and from there building
infrastructure including factories and railways
using Chinese companies and personnel along with
Iraqi labor. The Chinese-built factories will use
the same assembly lines and structure to be
integrated with
similar factories in China.
Iran’s Vice President, Eshaq Jahangiri has announced
that Iran signed a contract with China to implement
a project to electrify the main 900 kilometer
railway connecting Tehran to the north-eastern city
of Mashhad near the border to Turkmenistan and to
Afghanistan. Jahangiri added that there are also
plans to establish a Tehran-Qom-Isfahan high-speed
train line and to extend this up to the north-west
through Tabriz. OilPrice notes, “Tabriz, home to a
number of key sites relating to oil, gas, and
petrochemicals, and the starting point for the
Tabriz-Ankara gas pipeline, will be a pivot point of
the 2,300 kilometre New Silk Road that links Urumqi
(the capital of China’s western Xinjiang Province)
to Tehran, and connecting Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan,
Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan along the way, and then
via Turkey into Europe. Once the plans for this are
making substantial progress then China will extend
the
transport links into Iraq to the West.”
Additionally, according to Iraq’s Electricity
Minister Louay al-Khateeb, “China is our primary
option as a strategic partner in the long run…We
started with a US$10 billion financial framework for
a limited quantity of oil to finance some
infrastructure projects…[but] Chinese funding tends
to increase with the growing Iraqi oil production.”
That is, the more Iraqi oil China extracts the more
Iraqi projects it can finance. Today Iraq is
dependent on Iran for gas to serve its electric
generators owing to lack of gas infrastructure.
China
says it will change that.
Further the oil industry source states that Russia
and China are quietly preparing the ground to
relaunch the Iran-Iraq-Syria gas pipeline from
Iran’s huge Persian Gulf South Pars gas field it
shares with Qatar. A US-backed proxy war began
against Syria’s Bashar al-Assad in 2011 just after
he signed a deal with Iran and Iraq to build the
pipeline, rejecting an earlier Qatar proposal for an
alternative route. Turkey and Saudi Arabia and Qatar
poured billions of covert funds to finance terrorist
groups such as Al Qaeda and later ISIS in a vain
effort to topple Assad.
China is not alone in its efforts in Iraq and
throughout the Middle East, as erratic and
unpredictable US foreign policy drives former US
allies away. Russia, which just brokered a ceasefire
in Libya along with Turkey’s Erdogan, just offered
to sell its advanced S-400 Triumf air defense system
to Iraq, an offer that would have been unthinkable
even weeks ago. With Iraqi parliamentarians voting
to demand all foreign troops, including US and
Iranian, leave Iraq in the wake of the brazen US
assassination of Soleimani in Baghdad, it is
conceivable Baghdad would accept the offer at this
point, despite protest from Washington. Saudi
Arabia, Qatar, Algeria, Morocco and Egypt, have all
be in discussions with Russia in recent months to
buy the Russian defense system, said to be the
world’s most effective. Turkey has already
purchased it.
Before the US assassination of Soleimani, there were
numerous back-channel efforts for détente in the
costly wars that have raged across the region since
the US-instigated Arab Spring between Saudi Arabia,
the UAE, and Iran and Iraq. Russia and China have
both in different ways been playing a key role in
changing the geopolitical tensions. At this juncture
the credibility of Washington as any honest partner
is effectively zero if not minus.
The temporary calm following Iran’s admission of
shooting down the Ukraine airliner in no way
suggests Washington will go quietly. Trump and his
Defense Secretary Esper have defiantly rejected the
call to pull US troops from Iraq. The US president
just tweeted his support for renewed anti-government
Iran protests, in Farsi. We are clearly in for some
very nasty trouble in the Middle East as Washington
tries to deal with the unintended consequences of
its recent Middle East actions.
F. William Engdahl
is strategic risk consultant and lecturer,
he holds a degree in politics from Princeton
University and is a best-selling author on oil and
geopolitics, exclusively for the online magazine “New
Eastern Outlook.”
This article was
originally published by "New
Eastern Outlook" -
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