F. William Engdahl: AFRICOM and the Threat to China's National Security!

The Washington-led decision by NATO to bomb Gaddafi's Libya into submission, at an estimated cost to US taxpayers of at least $1 billion, has nothing to do with what the Obama Administration claims is a mission "to protect innocent civilians." In reality, it is part of a larger strategic assault by NATO and the Pentagon to control China's economic Achilles heel, meaning China's strategic dependence on large volumes of imported crude oil and gas. Today China is the world's second largest importer of oil, after the United States, and the gap is rapidly closing. With all of the wars the United States is involved in, our massive military complex needs oil, oil, and even more oil, to fill the needs of our tanks, planes, and transport vehicles! If we take a careful look at the map of Africa, and look our new "Pentagon Africa Command" (AFRICOM), the pattern which emerges is a careful strategy of controlling one of China's most strategically important oil and raw materials source: NATO's Libya campaign was, and is all about oil, but not about simply controlling Libyan high-grade crude, because the USA is nervous about reliable supplies. It is rather about controlling China's free access to long-term oil imports from Africa and the Middle East, in other words, controlling China itself.