US loses wattage to China in Iraq
By Dmitry Shlapentokh
Recently, the US media reported what seems to be a not very important event: China is among the countries that has received contracts for building electric power plants in Iraq. Still, close scrutiny of the event revealed a lot about the nature of not so much China's but the US's foreign policy and political system, and the real state of the US economy.
The very fact that China was invited to build power stations in Iraq looks like a rather surprising development. The point is that this should be done by the Americans, who not only have the expertise but - and this should be quite an important consideration - have allocated literally billions of dollars of taxpayer money for Iraqi "reconstruction", ie, providing the country with essential services, without which, as the George W Bush administration rightly asserts, a stable government is not possible. Still, after several years of work and all the billions spent, as one Iraqi official acknowledged, little has been done to provide even such essentials as electricity.
The report added that one should not blame the US companies engaged in projects because the security situation in the country is appalling. Still, the same security situation will exist for the Chinese, and Iraqi authorities are clearly aware that transferring the assignment to non-US companies will quite displease their masters in Washington.
Still, they decided to do so because the entire experience of the American occupation demonstrates to them the extreme inefficiency of not just the US military machine - the huge dinosaur of a superpower unable to deal with comparatively poorly armed insurgents - but also of the US's economic management. And this might have much more direct implications in the long run for the American imperial presence than a military defeat
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/China/IK13Ad01.html
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