As July 4th, our Independence Day, rolls around and we begin our troop withdrawal; as the Iraqis celebrate and after untold thousands of US soldiers have died and a million Iraqis to boot . . .

After the torturous interrogations by not so intelligent intelligence and contractors for actionable intelligence; after contaminating the country with Depleted Uranium; after shocking and awing the Cradle of Civilization and poisoning its food chain for posterity . . .

But mostly, after Bush and Cheney lied their way into war in search of non-existent weapons of mass destruction, now we allow the Chinese to do Iraq’s oil contract bidding so they won’t call in our two trillion in debt markers. Have a beer on me. Have two. For the two trillion we’ve blown in this pointless, even humiliating war.

As the New York Times reports in As Iraq Stabilizes, China Bids on Its Oil Fields, our British “buddies” BP are partnered with the China National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC) to win the first awarded contract in the latest Chinese grab for Iraq’s oil, a bit ballsy even though the country remains in our somewhat illegal sphere of interest.

China’s Iraqi oilfield interest is also pouring in from Sinopec, China’s refining giant, which offered $7.22 billion last week to buy Addax Petroleum, a Swiss-Canadian company operating in the Kurdistan area of Iraq and in West Africa. With Addax shareholders plus board and Canadian regulators approval, the done deal would be China’s largest overseas energy acquisition. How’s that for being bested?

Sinopec’s rival, CNPC, commenced drilling in the spring in the Ahdab oil field in southeastern Iraq. This as we were still spilling mutual blood. China’s big three oil companies, CNPC and China National Offshore Oil Corp all bid in varying combinations with the perennial Western multinationals Tuesday in Baghdad, though more negations are needed to smooth details of contracts.

It’s common in the oil industry for first auction results to run into weeks of haggling over details. But the Baghdad bidding Tuesday was unusually competitive. The multinationals demanded that Iraq’s government give them a bigger slice of the oil barrel revenues from every extra barrel of oil pumped past previous levels of Iraq’s “chronically corrupt and technologically weak national oil industry.” Well, that was something worth fighting for, if not the over-touted democracy.

After six deadly years of war, neither the Americans nor Iraqis figured China to come out of this nightmare as a winner of Iraqi oil. But then, stuff happens. The big Chinese push to buy and develop overseas oilfields came literally on the heels of the American military pullout from Iraq’s cities on Tuesday. One expert said “they were interested in Iraq before the war, and now that things have improved somewhat there, it’s somewhat on the agenda.” I’ll say.

Some say China’s presence there should lend stability in the region, so we should not be concerned. Yet the Iraqi government was first last year to award oil fields to Western companies through a no-bid process. They should know all about that from the US and Halliburton. But US senators barked at the deal. They wanted more transparency, so the auction replaced the plan. Unfortunately, it gave the Chinese a bigger role.

A steep rise in commodity prices surprised Chinese leaders last year. It exposed a weakness in their country’s huge manufacturing sector to soaring raw material prices. As oil prices then plunged in last autumn, China began buying up and storing huge quantities of oil. The need to invest in natural resources echoes China’s concerns of both our long-term credit worth and our dollar’s buying power. The thought of $2 trillion in foreign exchange reserves, mostly dollar-denominated bonds, has led China to look for ways to diversify (i.e., dig its way out of the hole) into other assets, like commodities.

China’s central bank, the People’s Bank of China, asked last Friday for the development of an international currency beside the dollar that could be a safe haven of real value. This is another sign of China’s search for international reserve stability. The Chinese are looking to buy into oilfields since crude prices jumped late last summer. Plus the Chinese are experienced with some of the most chaotic countries in Africa, and are gritty enough to cope even with Iraq. They even do business in Sudan, no play land.

They are more willing and able to accept more risk than competitors, given their blown bid with Unocal in the US four years ago or Chinalco’s failed try this spring to pick up a $19.5 billion stake in Rio Tinto of Australia. These setbacks have toughened the Chinese to come back with more interest in less stable countries like Iraq.

Bottom line, China has a huge thirst for oil. Its consumption has soared in the last decade, so they need far more than the aging oilfields of their country’s northeast.

Economic boom brought more consumption and major traffic jams in big cities. China charged past the US this year as the largest car market. China’s weathered the global downturn better than the US because it’s a nation of savers not debtors. Its oil consumption reached 8 billion barrels a day last year, from 4.9 million in 2001, according to BP, the British oil giant.

Yet their oil production has grown slowly; older fields have run dry, with new fields offshore or in western China barely filling the gap. China produced 3.8 million bpd in 2001, leaving the country in need of imports for half its oil. Remember, Iraq, which we seemed to have fought for so hard to lose, has the world’s third-biggest proven reserves after Saudi Arabia and Iran, the country we keep threatening to bomb. In fact, Iraq’s oil industry suffered decades of chaos and lack of investment. Many of their fields have not been fully explored. So we should be making nice to them.

As of now, Addax has oil licenses in two fields in the north of Iraq, the Taqtaq and Sangaw, North fields near Kirkuk, It’s drilling already struck large oil supplies in the Taqtaq field.

Starting today, we need to be a country again that pulls together not be mired in partisan politics, corruption, greed and ripping off the little guy. And we need to stop our perennial wars and the huge financial waste of the defense industry. Even while the notorious Dick Cheney warns of catastrophe, we need to develop our human resources again to spur an economic surge. That’s one way to be America again all year round.