U.S. ‘spent blood and treasure’ to free one country, now look who’s profiting
Twenty years after the U.S. liberated Iraq from the grip of a dictator, Saddam Hussein, another despotism, Communist China, is profiting off its postwar rebuilding effort through lucrative, exploitative projects that are part of China’s plan to dominate the world.
Beijing’s “Belt and Road Initiative” — described by critics as a “debt trap” — exchanges Chinese investments in massive foreign development projects for raw materials such as oil needed to fuel the Chinese economy and grow its international power.
On Monday, China’s state-run Global Times “boasted that Chinese companies are taking a leading role in the reconstruction of Iraq, making money and spreading Beijing’s influence in a country the United States spent blood and treasure to liberate from the tyranny of Saddam Hussein two decades ago,” reported the Foreign Desk by journalist Lisa Daftari.
“These Chinese companies are involved in a wide range of reconstruction efforts across Iraq, covering different areas including infrastructure development, the upgrading of transportation systems, home and community reconstruction, and the building of new schools,” the Global Times wrote, according to Daftari, who added the Chinese “are making an effort to exploit the lingering resentments of Iraqis over the U.S. invasion.”
She wrote: “Several times during the [Global Times] article, the authors stressed that China views Iraqi reconstruction as ‘more than just a brick-and-mortar exercise,’ but a way to spread China’s political and cultural influence under the rubric of helping Iraqis realize their ‘hopes and dreams.'”
Describing the Chinese Communist Party, or CCP’s, Belt and Road Initiative, America’s leading conservative Asia expert, Gordon Chang, author of “The Coming Collapse of China,” said in 2021: “The agenda here is to control the world.”
“What they want to do is control trade flows, so there are a lot of these projects which are considered to be [uneconomical] ones that the private sector would not finance. China’s been willing to come in because … local elites like to sign up … because they get paid off,” Chang told Tony Perkins, global Christian liberty advocate and Family Research Council president, on his program, “Washington Watch.”
“In many of China’s Belt and Road loans, there are these pretty onerous clauses,” he said, that stipulates that “any sort of dispute be conducted in China with the Chinese arbitration authorities, which means that China’s going to win every dispute.”
“The problem … is that nobody thinks that Chinese arbiters of fact and law are going to be any sort of neutral,” he said.
In some Belt and Road cases, Chang said, local authorities are forbidden from disclosing the terms of loan agreements to the public. “And it’s really because China has corrupted [partnering nation] elites to get these Belt and Road loans.”
He said many Chinese loans “make it extremely difficult for debtors,” but “a lot of these countries don’t care because [their] leaders have been paid off well in advance.”
On Tuesday, fresh from commenting in various media on Chinese “dictator for life” Xi Jinping’s growing relationship with Vladimir Putin, the Russian invader of Ukraine who aims to rebuild the former Soviet Union, Chang tweeted: “China’s regime corrupts or destroys everything it touches.”
#China’s regime corrupts or destroys everything it touches. #CCP
— Gordon G. Chang (@GordonGChang) March 21, 2023
(Go here to watch Chang speaking at the recent CPAC conference about the CCP’s role in sending fentanyl precursors to the United States.)
A Feb. 23 tweet by “MOS Translators” reports the “CCP has successfully forced Iraq to use the RMB [or renminbi, the official currency of the People’s Republic of China] in trade with Communist China. The Middle East is under the CCP’s sphere of influence.”
The CCP has successfully forced 🇮🇶Iraq to use the RMB in trade with Communist China. The Middle East is under the CCP’s sphere of influence. #RMB #CCP pic.twitter.com/lC1x6hCG8O
— MOS Translators (@Mos_Translators) February 23, 2023
Meanwhile, although Xi claims no desire to “bully” other nations — even as the CCP escalates its war preparations against free China (Taiwan) — his regime engages in massive human-rights abuses against its own citizens.
A 2018 report in the journal Central Asian Survey — “‘Thoroughly reforming them towards a healthy heart attitude’: China’s political re-education campaign in Xinjiang” — found that in the Xinjiang Ughur Autonomous Region of China, “untold thousands of Uyghurs and other Muslims have been and are being detained in clandestine political re-education facilities,” re-education camps “that the Chinese state is currently denying the very existence of.”
Regarding postwar Iraq’s dalliance with China, Daftari wrote: “Of course, China’s agents did not bother to tell their new Iraqi friends that under China’s idea of amoral foreign policy, Saddam Hussein and his bestial sons would still be tossing them into torture chambers, while Beijing happily did business with the murderous dictator and his heirs.”
