Control of Syrian oil .. How to serve Washington's strategic goals?

Before the evacuation of 1,000 US troops from northern Syria to western Iraq, the Pentagon had 2,000 US troops in Syria.

After US troops withdrew because of Erdogan's insistence on Ankara launching a ground offensive in northern Syria, the United States is still deploying 1,000 troops, mostly in the oil-rich eastern province of Deir ez-Zor and the military base of al-Tanf.

Al-Tanf military base is strategically located in southeastern Syria on the border between Syria, Iraq and Jordan, and extends on the Damascus-Baghdad highway, which is an important artery. Damascus Life.

Washington has illegally occupied 55 kilometers around the Tanf area since 2016, and hundreds of US Marines trained many Syrian armed groups there.

Instead of fighting the Islamic State, the continued presence of US troops at the al-Tanf military base is intended to reassure Israel's concerns about Iran's expanding influence in Iraq, Syria and Lebanon.

Control of Syrian oil
As for the oil and natural gas-rich province of Deir Ezzor, Syria used to produce modest quantities of oil to meet domestic needs before the war, equivalent to about 400,000 barrels per day, which is difficult to compare with the tens of millions of barrels of oil produced by the Gulf countries daily.

Though Donald Trump boasted in a sharp tweet of his posting after the withdrawal of 1,000 US troops from northern Syria - in which he said Washington had deployed troops in eastern Syria, where oil is located - the purpose of controlling Syrian oil is not to smuggle it out of the country. Syria, nor in denying IS to an important source of income.

In fact, no one can deny the fact that the ruins of ISIS fighters are still present in Syria and Iraq, but their emirate has completely disintegrated in the region, and their leadership is now on the run. Jabhat al-Nusra in Idlib, hundreds of kilometers from IS strongholds in eastern Syria.

After the destruction caused by eight years of proxy war, the Syrian government is in dire need of tens of billions of dollars in international aid to rebuild the country.

Overall, Washington is not only hampering efforts to provide international assistance to the country, but is actually wasting Syria's own resources, with the help of its only ally in the region, the Kurds.

Despite Donald Trump's claim that he is credited with confiscating Syrian oil wealth, it is important to note that the "scorched earth" policy is not a business strategy, but an institutional logic adopted by the deep state.

President Trump is known to be a businessman and, at least ostensibly, a non-intrusive ideology. As a novice in international diplomacy, he has been misled on numerous occasions by the Pentagon and the National Security Service in Washington.

The Importance of Arabian Gulf Oil
Saudi investments in the United States are estimated at only $ 750 billion, but if we add them to Western Europe, the UAE, Kuwait and Qatar to Western economies, the total will amount to trillions of dollars from Gulf investments in the North, America and Western Europe.

To highlight the importance of Arabian Gulf oil in an energy-hungry industrial world, OPEC data showed that Saudi Arabia has the largest crude oil reserves in the world of about 265 billion barrels, and its daily oil production exceeds 10 million barrels.

Iran and Iraq each have 150 billion barrels, and each has the capacity to produce five million barrels per day, while the UAE and Kuwait each have 100 billion barrels and each produce three million barrels per day.As a result, all the Gulf states have 788 billion barrels. More than half of the world's proven oil reserves of 1,477 billion barrels.

It is no wonder that 36,000 US troops and aircraft carriers have been deployed to several military bases in the oil-rich Arabian Gulf in accordance with the 1980 Carter Doctrine, which states: This attack will be repulsed by any means possible, including military force. "

In Trump's first visit to Saudi Arabia in May 2017, the most important point on Trump's agenda was first to support the Saudi-led "NATO Arab" idea to counter Iran's influence in the region, and secondly announced an unprecedented arms deal for Saudi Arabia. Saudi Arabia, the package included between $ 98 billion and $ 128 billion in arms sales.

Through this mutual relationship, the United States provides security to the ruling families of the Gulf Arab states by providing weapons and troops.

In contrast, oil sheikhs in the Gulf are contributing huge investments worth hundreds of billions of dollars to Western economies.

Cost sharing
For the period of "American peace", which is the reality of the contemporary colonial system, according to a plan published in The New York Times in January 2017, 210,000 US military personnel were stationed around the world, including 79,000 in Europe, 45,000 in Japan, 28 thousand and 500 in South Korea, and 36 thousand in the Middle East.

Donald Trump continued to call on NATO to share the cost of deploying US troops, particularly in Europe, where 47,000 US troops have been stationed in Germany since the end of World War II, 15,000 in Italy and 8,000 in the United Kingdom. It was already shared between Washington and the host countries.

As oil-rich Gulf states pay two-thirds of the cost of maintaining 36,000 US troops in the Persian Gulf, where more than half of the world's proven oil reserves are located, Washington is contributing a third.