So just how pissed is chimp over this Beijing-Tehran oil deal?

This part below is towards the end of a long article:

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/China/GL21Ad01.html

Beijing-Tehran-Moscow
At the end of 2004, Beijing signed a $70 billion energy agreement with Tehran, China's largest Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries energy deal to date. China's state 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 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 Tehran Metro underground. A second phase in the Iran-China strategic energy cooperation will involve 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.

On signing the deal, Iran's Petroleum Minister announced that Tehran would like to see China replace Japan as Iran's largest oil importer. As well, Iran has what are estimated to be the world's second largest reserves of natural gas after Russia. Iran is a place of enormous strategic importance to China, to Japan, to Russia, to the European Union, and for all these reasons, to Washington as well.

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

:(

Washington knows that only too well. So does Beijing.

With Iran's moves towards uranium enrichment, setting up of an oil bourse and willingness to make oil/gas deals that Washington doesn't like, I suspect that Bushco will move Iran to the front burner after the New Year. It wouldn't surprise me to see increased rhetoric escalating to sabre-rattling and then.....?
:shrug:

That is how most of us got our feet into these countries. Goes back a long way. Troops in the country to protect your investment. And we in the West have always felt it was right and have even done it in China. Looks to me like it is our major problem in the Middle East as that is ben Lardens reason for wanting us to get out. Took India over 400 years to get the Brits out. China and the USA sitting in the Middle East looks like bad news to me.

That the war in Iraq has nothing to do with the transparently thin stated objectives and everything to do with a PNAC inspired game of geo-political/ military brinksmanship with China and to a lesser degree Russia and The E.U. (who will eventually have to choose sides and may already have) concerning the control of future, dwindling energy production. This thing WILL get out of control. Neither side can afford to lose since neither side is willing to SERIOUSLY invest in alternative energy sources or to take the tough but necessary steps to adapt oil based economies to survive the increasing scarcity of the finite resource. (If either side was willing or able to "ween" themselves off of oil they would be doing something about it by now.)

I believe that at some point not too far off there will be full out war between these competing interests and the this war in Iraq is just a skirmish in prelude to the real thing.

Think about this the next time you protest the use of nuclear power. Humans, even responsible, non glutonous humans, now need energy to survive and it has to come from somewhwere and at some cost. It just does.

This game will bankrupt a government. China initially has chosen the buy up resources approach while the US has chosen war. China may be forced to move its military and make alliances to counter, but the trump card is holding American debt.

and why the massive amount of U.S. debt in foreign hands doesn't TERRIFY non neo-conservatives (read tradional) and force them to take back their party I'll never know.

I often forget to click on Asia Times but I'm always rewarded when I do.

I'll find fascinating stuff and find myself wishing US papers had the balls to write like their Asian counterparts. Then I come back to reality and remember our MSM are chimp lapdogs and wouldn't dare...