You wouldn’t know this from listening to Chinese officials. “The Chinese side follows closely the security situation in Iraq,” and “hopes to see an early restoration of security, stability and order,” was the boilerplate statement from foreign ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying last Friday.

“The Foreign Ministry and the Chinese Embassy in Iraq will continue to follow closely the developments of the situation in Iraq and take all necessary means to ensure the security and the lawful rights and interests of Chinese citizens and institutions in Iraq,” she continued.

While officials may not be so direct, that’s not the case with others. The situation in Iraq will almost certainly drive up oil prices for China, which imports about 60 percent of its crude, Lin Boqiang, director of the China Center for Energy Economic Research at Xiamen University, warned yesterday.

So far the conflict has been in the north, away from Iraq’s most productive oil fields, which are mainly located in the south. If the crisis engulfs the southern part of the country, Lin predicts, prices of Brent Crude will rise above $120 a barrel, the China Daily paper reported. (Up from about $113 a barrel today.)

China surpassed the U.S. in September of last year to become the world’s largest net importer of crude oil and other liquid fuels, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. While U.S. total annual production is likely to rise 31 percent from 2011 to 2014, to 13.3 million barrels per day, driven largely by shale oil, Chinese production will grow only 5 percent, with 2014 production to be just one third that of the U.S., the EIA predicts.

Iraq is China’s fifth-largest overseas oil supplier, behind top producer Saudi Arabia (which last year provided 19 percent of the country’s 5.6 million barrels a day), as well as Angola, Oman, and Russia. Over the last five years, state-owned oil and gas giant China National Petroleum has rapidly expanded its presence in the Iraqi oil business. CNPC is now operating four projects in the as-yet-untouched southern part of the country, making it the single biggest foreign investor in Iraq.

Last year, CNPC produced 299 million barrels from Iraq, almost one-third of its overseas output. Meanwhile, Chinese state enterprises, refiner Sinopec and offshore player CNOOC, have both made big investments in Iraq’s oil industry.

Iraq, which pumps around 3 million barrels of crude a day, had been expected to reach 8 million barrels by 2035, according to the Paris-based International Energy Agency. By then, it was expected, 80 percent of Iraqi production would go to China. “Baghdad to Beijing is the new Silk Road of the global oil trade—oil from Baghdad and capital investment from Beijing,” Fatih Birol, chief economist at the IEA, told Bloomberg Businessweek in January 2113.

“Within OPEC, Iraq remains the main source of most of the expected capacity growth, but this expansion looks increasingly at risk” because of Iraq’s precarious security situation, Maria van der Hoeven, executive director of the IEA, wrote in the forword to the Medium-Term Oil Market Report, released earlier today.

While Iraq has been growing in importance as a source for China’s energy needs, that’s likely to change if the crisis continues much longer. China may instead focus more on tapping oil in Russia, Iran, and Oman, according to Li Li, research and strategy director at ICIS C1 Energy, a Shanghai-based energy information consultancy, English-language China Daily reported.

babyhueypnewton posted:

AmeriKKKa really fucked up in Iraq, now were destroying everything cause it's better than allowing Iran and China to use our hard work (let alone the Iraqi people). Obama is much more savage than Bush who at least was a Christian and tried to build up an old fashioned puppet regime.

theyre the same guys. lookit the current state department neocons.

Lessons posted:

Indeed, President Obongo is a savage, un-Christian pagan. Thanks for more of the gripping analysis we've come to expect from Baby Newton. Baby Einstein.

hahaha

babyfinland posted:

my money is on the peshmerga

My bum is on the cheese.

Crow posted:

Damn that is really cool. Then what happened

i started downloading the last couple episodes of louie and logged on to the SOcial Media. how is ur day going

daddyholes posted:

why would anyone assume competence or success on the part of the U.S. government, capital doesn't confer wisdom & hegemony constantly meets friction. The American state put on one roller skate and one rollerblade and now it is negotiating repaving the sidewalk to match, this too will fail the impossible test of 'practical' liberal intervention to 'preserve' global 'security'

I saw a person travelling around on one roller skate, and one shoe, and it made perfect sense

Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi posted:

"Dark Horse"
(feat. Ayman al-Zawahiri)

Oh, no.

Ayman al-Zawahiri:
Yeah
Ya'll know what it is
Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi
Ayman al-Zawahir, aha.
Let's rage

Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi:
I knew you were
You were gonna come to me
And here you are
But you better choose carefully
‘Cause I, I’m capable of anything
Of anything and everything

Make me your Aphrodite
Make me your one and only
But don’t make me your enemy, your enemy, your enemy

So you wanna play with magic
Boy, you should know what you're falling for
Baby do you dare to do this?
Cause I’m coming at you like a dark horse
Are you ready for, ready for
A perfect storm, perfect storm
Cause once you’re mine, once you’re mine
There’s no going back

Mark my words
This love will make you levitate
Like a bird
Like a bird without a cage
But down to earth
If you choose to walk away, don’t walk away

It’s in the palm of your hand now baby
It’s a yes or no, no maybe
So just be sure before you give it all to me
All to me, give it all to me

So you wanna play with magic
Boy, you should know what you're falling for
Baby do you dare to do this?
Cause I’m coming at you like a dark horse
Are you ready for, ready for
A perfect storm, perfect storm
Cause once you’re mine, once you’re mine (love trippin')
There’s no going back

Ayman al-Zawahiri:
Uh
She’s a beast
I call her Karma (come back)
She eats your heart out
Like Jeffrey Dahmer (woo)
Be careful
Try not to lead her on
Shorty’s heart is on steroids
Cause her love is so strong
You may fall in love
When you meet her
If you get the chance you better keep her
She's sweet as pie but if you break her heart
She'll turn cold as a freezer
That fairy tale ending with a knight in shining armor
She can be my Sleeping Beauty
I’m gon’ put her in a coma
Woo!
Damn I think I love her
Shorty so bad, I’m sprung and I don’t care
She ride me like a roller coaster
Turned the bedroom into a fair (a fair!)
Her love is like a drug
I was tryna hit it and quit it
But lil' mama so dope
I messed around and got addicted

Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi:
So you wanna play with magic
Boy, you should know what you're falling for (you should know)
Baby do you dare to do this?
Cause I’m coming at you like a dark horse (like a dark horse)
Are you ready for, ready for (ready for)
A perfect storm, perfect storm (a perfect storm)
Cause once you’re mine, once you’re mine (mine)
There’s no going back

vampirarchist posted:

babyfinland posted:

my money is on the peshmerga

iraqi kurdistan gonna go independent and become the second israel

i've been seeing pkk graffiti everywhere near my house, which is near the site of some major pkk activities 30 years ago, and it warms my heart and brings me hope. i want to be incidentally slaughtered for someone else's revolution

On Thursday, The New York Times revealed the U.S. ambassador in Iraq, Robert Beecroft, and the State Department’s top official in Iraq, Brett McGurk, recently met with the controversial Iraqi politician Ahmed Chalabi, who has been described as a potential candidate to replace al-Maliki. Chalabi is the former head of the Iraqi National Congress, a CIA-funded Iraqi exile group that strongly pushed for the 2003 U.S. invasion.