Adam Smith laments the cost of war, but adds, ‘In the midst of the most destructive foreign war, therefore, the greater part of manufacturers may frequently flourish greatly: and on the contrary they may decline on the return to peace.’ War, it seems, is good for business.
DEFINING IDEA…
The first panacea for a mismanaged nation is inflation of the currency; the second is war. Both bring temporary prosperity; both bring a permanent ruin. But both are the refuge of political and economic opportunists.
~ ERNEST HEMINGWAY, NOVELIST AND JOURNALIST
Of those who have ‘flourished greatly’ perhaps oil services industry leader Halliburton stands head and shoulders above the rest. Prior to 2000, the company’s CEO was none other than Vice President Dick Cheney. He retired to take the White House post on a severance package worth $36 million. Purely coincidence perhaps, but the second most powerful man in the world used to head a company that just happened to win huge contracts for rebuilding Iraq…
Logic would say there was probably a conflict of interest, but maybe they did a great job? Perhaps troops were looked after and protected, maybe Halliburton was frugal with US tax payers’ dollars? Not according to several federal investigations. The House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform (HCOGR) conducts vigorous investigations to uncover waste, fraud and abuse to improve the operations of the federal government and examine wrongdoing in the private sector. Following dozens of hearings, the Committee identified abuse in federal spending as well as billions in misspent or mismanaged funds.
Investigations by the Committee documented wasteful spending by KBR, the former Halliburton subsidiary, under the contract to support the troops and the contract to Restore Iraqi Oil (RIO). During a hearing in February 2007, the Committee learned that the Defence Contract Audit Agency (DCAA) identified over $10 billion in questioned and unsupported costs in Iraq, with $2.7 billion from the two KBR contracts alone.
Earlier Committee investigations found specific examples of unchecked spending by KBR, such as billing taxpayers $45 for a case of soda and $100 to wash a bag of laundry, inflating costs for gasoline delivery and abandoning new trucks that had broken down instead of maintaining them.
In the documentary ‘Iraq for Sale: The War Profiteers’ (2006) countless former employees blew the whistle. Military personnel replaced by contractors on inflated salaries, 5-star accommodation while the troops bunked in cramped tents, $75,000 trucks being destroyed because of a flat tyre… One former KGB/Halliburton truck driver described how wrongly ordered equipment, computers still in boxes and even new vehicles would be taken to ‘burn pits’ and set alight so the company could claim the loss and get more money. The evidence compiled was so shocking that director Robert Greenwald was invited to testify before Congress.
Halliburton may not have been the only contractor to profit from war but the powerful and influential contacts make it especially distasteful.
HERE’S AN IDEA FOR YOU…
Don’t believe everything politicians tell you, especially those with vested financial interests. As a society we all need to question authority far more than we do and remember that any and every argument can find supporting evidence. The Intelligence Community call this ‘cherry picking’, where statistics and facts are taken out of context to support a claim.