On Saturday, Hua Chunying, spokesperson for the Foreign Ministry, tweeted: "China won't be Iraq."

She tweeted that in response to a CNN report that said US politicians were trying to pressure their intelligence community to say they "have some kind of smoking gun with regard to China", an old trick used by their predecessors 18 years ago to launch the Iraqi war.

Ever since the start of the novel coronavirus outbreak, certain US politicians have been trying to blame China for it. And as the situation has continued to worsen in the United States, they have gone one step further by fabricating the conspiracy theory that the virus was leaked from a Chinese virology laboratory. They do so, not only to shrug off their own responsibility for failing to curb the outbreak effectively in the US, but also to weaken China.

These US politicians hope to turn China into a country torn by war with its people living in fear. A simple look at the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region will show that is not an exaggeration. Organized rioters, armed with weapons of various kinds, have intimidated law-abiding residents and disrupted ordinary life in the SAR. There are signs that behind the violence are the black hands of US agencies, and some Hong Kong residents have protested, saying "Hong Kong gangsters are made in America".

But the dreams of the US politicians that they can turn China into another Iraq or Syria will never be realized. China will never allow any violation of its sovereignty, and the conspiracy theory about the virus being engineered in a lab has long been proven wrong by scientists worldwide.

Chinese scientists have been cooperating with their global counterparts in tracking the origin of COVID-19. However, that's no excuse for the US politicians to presume China's "guiltiness" and claim, groundlessly, that the virus originated in China. The US politicians are trying to cover up their own failure to protect people in the US and they want China to be their scapegoat.

US politicians should stop attacking China and protect the US people.