Benjamin Hart: President Trump Is Obsessed With Stealing Syria’s Oil There is one thing about the chaotic situation in Syria that does seem to preoccupy the president: oil. Precious, precious oil. Over the past weeks, through tweets and public statements, he has made it clear that he considers the protection of it a very high priority.
CNN reported on Thursday that the U.S. would send tanks and troops to an area of eastern Syria to reinforce Kurdish defenses guarding oil fields there. As The Guardian notes, “It is quite likely it would take more troops to deploy, maintain, supply and protect armored units in the middle of the eastern Syrian desert than the roughly 1,000 that were in the country before the Turkish invasion.”
The question of why the U.S. has the right to another country’s oil — especially as it is supposedly completely withdrawing from that country — has received surprisingly little attention amid the ongoing disaster in Syria. But the notion that American’s central goal in the Middle East is plunder of natural resources recalls conspiracy theories around the U.S. invasion of Iraq. And Trump’s current obsession with this point recalls his own sentiments about that war (which he falsely claims not to have supported). In 2013, Trump tweeted, “I still can’t believe we left Iraq without the oil.” Axios reported last year that Trump repeatedly floated the ludicrous idea to Iraq’s prime minister that the country should repay the U.S. — in oil — for the favor of having invaded it.
As the Kurds try to regroup amid the death and destruction around them, they can comfort themselves by knowing that the commander-in-chief of their erstwhile ally has his heart in the right place.
http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/10/president-trump-is-obsessed-with-stealing-syrias-oil.html