THEME: IRAQ VS. CHINA
There is an article from yesterday's NYT about proposals to strengthen ties between Canada and China:

"A China agreement might serve as a wake-up call for the U.S.," said Bob Dunbar, an independent energy consultant here who until recently followed oil issues at the Canadian Energy Research Institute.

Executives at energy companies and investment banks in Calgary say an agreement with the Chinese could materialize as early as next month. Ian La Couvee, a spokesman for Enbridge, a Canadian pipeline company, said it was in talks to offer a Chinese company a 49 percent stake in a 720-mile pipeline planned between northern Alberta and the northwest coast of British Columbia.

The pipeline project, which is expected to cost at least $2 billion, would send as much as 80 percent of its capacity of 400,000 barrels a day to China with the remainder going to California refineries. Sinopec, one of China's largest oil companies, was said by executives briefed on the talks to be the likeliest Chinese company in the project.

History will note that the Iraq War was really a blessing to China. Normally, the US would view the growing Chinese economic might and ambitions with hostility. Instead, the Bush Administration is so tied down with suicide bombers and an overstretched military that they are ignoring the growing economic threat that China poses. As further evidence of W's obliviousness to anything other than Iraq, look at how its essentially given a pass to Putin's rollback of democracy in Russia and associated satellites, e.g. Ukraine.

USA & China play the same roles that Britain & USA played in 19th Century: debtor vs. creditor, Empire vs. financier. Like Britain, the USA is an Empire that whose ambitions are sowing the seeds of its long-term demise. Like Britain, we see the world as a better place under Pax Britannica/America. In the aggregate, it probably is as peace is preferred to chaos. But the ultimate benefactors will not be the Britains/Americans, but the lenders and manufacturers who are profiting from those ambitions: the Chinese.