Chapter 88 Tend to "oil"

In 2002, Washington was preparing to launch a military attack on Baghdad without the support of the UN Security Council, which violated the UN Charter, and the US did not receive major support from Britain, Portugal, Spain, Poland, and several other countries. Supported by most of the major Allies.Russia, China, France and even Germany have all publicly opposed the Iraq war that the United States is preparing to launch.Russian Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov issued an official statement that Moscow opposes any US military action against Iraq.Russia's Lukoil and two other state-owned companies have signed a 23-year contract to develop the Qurna oil field in western Iraq.China also opposes war.CNPC has signed an oil contract with great potential in western Iraq.France also had the right to develop Iraqi oil under Saddam Hussein's regime.All three countries understood that a unilateral war by the United States would permanently end their Iraqi oil dreams.

At that time, China was gradually replacing Japan as the world's second largest oil importer after the United States.At its current rate of growth, within a decade it will easily be the world's largest oil consumer, relying almost entirely on imports.China cannot find enough oil reserves domestically.China understands that a reliable oil supply is the guarantee of future economic development.Now the largest oil resource will be firmly controlled by the military power of the United States.For Beijing, the news is unmistakable and deeply worrying. Despite calls from all over the world to oppose the Iraq War, the countdown to the Iraq War launched by Bush has entered a countdown stage. This is a huge question mark for most people in the world-why?Why does the United States use force to pursue "peace and stability" at the expense of the world? Is this what he calls "soft power"?Why is she ignoring the risks to create instability in the entire oil producing area, which may even cause a new oil price shock and a global recession, just to hit Iraq?The official answer from Washington is that Saddam Hussein possesses weapons of mass destruction and has ties to Al Qaeda terrorists.Is that reason enough for George Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, and others in Washington to start a new Iraq war?This is not convincing.Their suspicions were confirmed after 130,000 U.S. troops were permanently stationed in Iraq.

The military invasion of Iraq, as expected, ended within a few weeks without any suspense.The war was officially declared over in May 2003.There was only symbolic resistance, and Iraq did not use terrorist weapons.Perhaps never in history has such a small country suffered such a devastating blow.One can see a clear picture of the war on CNN and Rupert Murdoch's Fox News network.The United States is also under the pressure of international public opinion.The US position is indeed as Bush said, "You are either with us or against us". Washington has repeatedly emphasized that they have justified reasons to launch a war against Iraq. This reason is that Iraq has chemical weapons, biological weapons and even nuclear weapons that threaten the United States and must be eliminated.And when U.N. inspectors found none of that, they switched to arguing that the real cause was Saddam Hussein's alliances with Osama bin Laden and the shadowy Al Qaeda terrorist group.Then, the rationale changed again, that it was worthwhile to replace the dictatorship with a democratic one.After the war, Bush formulated a "Strategy for Advancing Freedom" with the theme of democracy for US policy in the Middle East.In his January 2004 State of the Union address, Bush called for a doubling of the National Endowment for Democracy's budget for the development of "free elections, free markets, free speech, and labor unions in the Middle East" in order to promote Democratic political construction.As with Yugoslavia and Eastern Europe, it is clear that Washington plans to weaken existing regimes in order to change the status quo.Its intentions are extremely far-reaching.

Once the US military took control of the country, all excuses for war, such as weapons, terrorists, disappeared.Sources suggest Tony Blair is betting his political future on fraud.It looks as though Blair's Washington allies are using him as a scapegoat.Shortly after the US seized Baghdad and Iraqi oil fields, various officials in Washington began to admit that the reasons were not what they had previously stated. The most brazen was Undersecretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, an advocate of preventive war, author of the 1992 white paper and co-author of the September 2000 report on America's New Century Project, the leader of the hawks. In March 2003, less than a month after Bush officially declared the war in Iraq over, Wolfowitz told delegates heading to a security conference in Singapore: "Simply put, the most important difference between North Korea and Iraq is the economic For Iraq, we have no choice. Iraq is drowning in oil.” North Korea’s acknowledgment of the development of nuclear warheads and missiles did not impress Wolfowitz or those in the Pentagon.Iraq is their goal.

In late December 2003, Washington quietly withdrew the 400-man task force that had spent months searching Iraq for weapons of mass destruction for any clues and found nothing.By January 2004, Colin Powell was forced to concede that the United States had no evidence of Iraqi-Al Qaeda links, but pallidly insisted that those links might exist, and thought that was enough.Powell argued that Bush started the war because "he thought the region was at risk, America was at risk."A well-respected Washington think tank, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, has condemned "systematic misinformation" about the so-called Iraqi weapons threat.Regarding Powell's explanation, people can't help but ask, why does Washington take such a big risk to deal with this shadowy threat?

Postwar reconstruction is controlled by the Pentagon, not conventionally by the State Department.The Pentagon's Wolfowitz made it clear that lucrative contracts for the Iraqi oil industry should only be awarded to good friends of the government.Cheney's Halliburton was at the top, along with Bechtel, and other oil companies in the US and UK.Washington has intensified its demands that its allies in Europe, Russia and elsewhere write off Iraq's debts.Washington paid nothing, and it won again.While rejecting the UN's peacekeeping mission, it also requires foreign militaries to shoulder the burden.In short, Washington's attitude looks more imperial than democratic.George Bush has spoken reverently of his Arab dream, which is to bring democracy to Iraq and the rest of the authoritarian Arab world.Certainly, democracy tethered to the barrels of American main battle tanks is not the dream of most Iraqis.

Mitchell Mitchell, Blair's former cabinet minister, who resigned in June just after the war ended, told London's Guardian newspaper that "whether Saddam Hussein is in power or not, the Bush cabinet intends to control the Gulf by force." area".Mitcher went on to point out that "the war on terrorism is a veil used by the United States to conceal its true intention, which is to achieve broader strategic and political goals."Cheney's plan for a new American century and the Baker Institute's energy report are regarded by Mitch as Washington's political blueprint.According to Mitcher, the talk about weapons of mass destruction and the links between Iraq and al-Qaeda is just a smoke screen.

He also found another possible explanation, which is that "reliable hydrocarbon energy sources in the US and UK are being exhausted ... the UK will face severe gas shortages by 2005".The former cabinet minister pointed out that the UK, especially the major British oil companies such as BP and Royal Shell, would never reconcile themselves to being excluded from the ranks of robbing the world's remaining oil resources."British Petroleum's chief executive, Sir Brown, warned Washington not to carve up Iraq for his own companies after the war," Mitch recalls.Mitchell, who was Britain's former environment secretary, may have known the contents of the unusual memo, which was submitted to Blair's government just days before 11 September.