Reply #6: Of course they do...the Beijing-Teheran-Moscow connection

[mia]

Central Asia, Washington and Beijing Energy Geo-politics


by F. William Engdahl

December 19, 2005


...Beijing takes the geopolitical prize

In October this year, Beijing scored a second major geopolitical coup when China completed a $4.18 billion takeover of PetroKazakhstan Inc. It was, in a sense, revenge on Washington for the blocking of the China acquisition of Unocal. US oil majors had made major efforts to lock up Kazakhstan oil after discovery of major oil offshore in the Kashagan field. They failed. ExxonMobil was charged with bribery of Kazakh officials to win presence in the Kazakh oil business, and a senior Mobil executive was later jailed on US tax evasion in New York tied to the Kazakh bribery payments.


...Washington suffers strategic setback

A major setback for Washington’s Eurasian encirclement strategy vis-à-vis China and Russia came several months ago when Uzbekistan’s autocratic President, Islam Karimov, told Washington it could no longer use the Karshi-Khanabad military air base in southeast Uzbekistan, a major piece in Washington’s Eurasian chess board play put into place after September 11, 2001.


...Beijing-Teheran-Moscow

At the end of 2004, Beijing signed a $70 billion energy agreement with Teheran, China’s largest OPEC energy deal to date. Sinopec agreed to buy 250 million tons of LNG over 30 years from Iran, as well as to develop the giant Yadavaran field. That agreement covered the comprehensive development by China’s state Sinopec of the giant Yadavaran gas field, construction of a related petrochemical and gas industry including pipelines. As part of the huge Iran-China economic cooperation agreement, China’s state-run military construction company, NORINCO, will expand the Teheran Metro underground. A second phase in the Iran-China strategic energy cooperation involves constructing a pipeline in Iran to take oil some 386 kilometers to the Caspian Sea, there to link up with the planned pipeline from China into Kazakhstan....



Energy is the Achilles Heel of China’s economic growth. Beijing knows that only too well. So does Washington. A decision to take military action against Iran would pull a far larger cast of actors into the fray than Iraq.

http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=viewArticle&code=%20EN20051219&articleId=1562