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News :: Regime |
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Bush Comes Clean: It Was About The Oil |
Current rating: 0 |
by Ted Rall
(No verified email address) |
24 Apr 2003
Modified: 11:55:24 AM |
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Corporate Vultures Swoop Into the Killing Fields |
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Iraq is going to hell. Shiites are killing Sunnis, Kurds are killing Arabs and Islamists are killing secular Baathists. Baghdad, the cradle of human civilization, has been left to looters and rapists. As in Beirut during the '70s, neighborhood zones are separated by checkpoints manned by armed tribesmen. The war has, however, managed to unite Iraqis in one respect: everyone loathes the United States.
Some Iraqis hate us for deposing Saddam Hussein. No dictator remains in power without the tacit support of at some of his subjects. Now that we've committed the cardinal sin of conquest--getting rid of the old system without thinking up a new one--even those who chafed under Saddam blame us for their present misery.
Others resent our Pentagon-appointed pretender, 58-year-old banker/embezzler Ahmed Chalabi. The State Department points out that Iraq's new puppet autocrat has zero support among Iraqis, having lived abroad since 1958. But who knows? Maybe he was a really popular kid.
Thousands of Iraqis have been reduced to poverty, raped and murdered by rampaging goons as U.S. Marines stood around and watched. Wanna guess how long it will take them to "get over it"? We watched the plunder of museums in Mosul and Baghdad safe at home with our tisk-tisk dismay, but Iraqis will remain outraged by the wanton devastation we wrought through war, permitted through negligence and shrugged off through arrogance. ("We didn't allow it," Rumsfeld shrugged. "It happened.") Imagine foreign troops sitting idly, laughing as hooligans trashed the Smithsonian, stole the gold from Fort Knox and burned down the Department of the Interior.
That was us in Iraq.
But let's forget this penny ante stuff. Let the real looting begin! George W. Bush's bestest buddies, corporate executives at companies which donate money in exchange for a few rounds of golf and a few million-dollar favors, are being handed the keys to Iraq's oil fields.
Bush's brazen Genghis Khan act seems carefully calculated to confirm our worst suspicions. First he appoints retired general Jay Garner, president of a GOP-connected defense contractor, SYColeman Corp., as viceroy of occupied Iraq. "The idea is we are in Iraq not as occupiers but as liberators, and here comes a guy who has attachments to companies that provided the wherewithal for the military assault on that country," marvels David Armstrong, a defense analyst at the National Security News Service. A smart and/or decent president would have picked a civilian for a civil administration post.
Then Bush slips a $680 million contract to the Bechtel Group, whose Republican-oriented board includes such Reagan-era GOP luminaries as CIA director William Casey, secretary of state George Schulz and defense secretary Caspar Weinberger. The deal puts the company in position to receive a big part of the $100 billion estimated total cost of Iraqi reconstruction. According to the Center for Responsive Politics, Bechtel gave Republican candidates, including Bush, about $765,000 in PAC, soft money and individual campaign contributions between 1999 and 2002.
Finally, refusing to accept bids from potential competitors, Bush grants a two-year, $490 million contract for Iraqi oil field repairs to Halliburton Co., the Houston-based company where Dick Cheney worked as CEO from 1995 to 2000. "It will look a lot worse if Halliburton gets the USAID [Agency for International Development] contract, too," Bathsheba Crocker, an Iraq specialist for the Center for Strategic and International Studies, warned in March. "Then it really starts looking bad." Guess what! Halliburton has since scored a piece of that $600 million USAID contract.
Are we looking bad yet?
Only Bush's most intimate friends were invited to bid for these contracts. Even businesses based in Great Britain, where Tony Blair risked his political career to support Bush, have been excluded from a rigged process where only U.S.-based, Republican-led, Bush-connected companies need apply.
Two senior Democratic Congressmen, Henry Waxman and John Dingell, are asking the General Accounting Office to look into these sleazy kickback deals. "These ties between the vice president and Halliburton have raised concerns about whether the company has received favorable treatment from the administration," their letter reads. Well, duh. But don't count on appropriate action--like impeachment proceedings--from the do-nothing Dems.
Bush's right-wing Gang of Four--Cheney, Rummy, Condi and Wolfy--saw Operation Iraqi Freedom as a chance to line their buddies' pockets, emasculate the Muslim world, place U.S. military bases in Russia's former sphere of influence and, according to the experts, lower the price of oil by busting OPEC. "There will be a substantial increase in Iraqi oil production [under U.S. occupation], and I wouldn't be surprised if schemes emerged to weaken, if not destroy, OPEC," says Jumberto Calderón, former energy minister of Venezuela. Former OPEC secretary general Fadhil Chalabi (no relation to Ahmed) estimates that increased exploration could potentially double Iraq's proven reserves, which would raise production from 2.4 to 10 million barrels a day. Such Saudi-scale production would "bring OPEC to its knees," says Chalabi. The cartel's member nations, ten of 11 of them predominantly Muslim, would suffer staggering increases in poverty as a result of falling oil revenues, plunging some into the political chaos that breeds Islamist fundamentalism. Meanwhile, the people of Iraq, whose self-flagellating Shias already make the evening news look like a rerun of Iran's 1979 Islamic revolution, would starve as foreign infidels raked in billions thanks to the oil beneath their land.
Time to dust off the duct tape.
Ted Rall is the author of "Gas War: The Truth Behind the American Occupation of Afghanistan," an analysis of the underreported Trans-Afghanistan Pipeline project and the real motivations behind the war on terrorism.
Copyright 2003 Ted Rall
http://www.tedrall.com |
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Crony Capitalism Goes To War |
by Arianna Huffington
(No verified email address) |
Current rating: 0
24 Apr 2003
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Quick quiz: What's the most exclusive club in America? How about the Augusta National Golf Club, whose 300 members withstood the slings and arrows of Martha Burk with nary a scratch earlier this month? Or maybe it's the U.S. Senate, where a seat at one of the historic roll-top desks can go for as much as $60 million?
Nope, not even close. Our proud democracy's most select body is the tiny group of contenders invited to bid for capitalism's crown jewel: The Iraq contract.
Talk about cozy. Sneaking a peek through the blackout curtains the Bush administration has used to cloak the awarding of contracts to rebuild Iraq is like catching a glimpse of a very special incest episode of "ElimiDate": a bunch of muscular, cash-drunk, hand-picked corporate Lotharios vying for the affection of their governmental kissing cousins.
The relationship between those doling out these fantastically valuable deals and those receiving them is so intimate taxpayers should demand that the participants be checked for STDs before the first mega-buck check is left on the dresser. An orgy of unsafe corporate intercourse has been going on.
For full impact, this column should be a flow-chart. Like the ones the FBI uses to show the inner workings of a mafia crime family. But instead of illustrating the interrelationships of the Soprano crew, this chart would lay out the connections that guaranteed that the big winners in the post-Saddam sweepstakes would be those two ultimate Washington insiders, Halliburton and Bechtel Group.
We all know about Halliburton and its former CEO in the very highest of secure and undisclosed places, Dick Cheney. But the Bechtel chart is really Byzantine -- starting with George Shultz, former Bechtel president, former Reagan Secretary of State, and currently both a Bechtel board member and chairman of the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq.
Then there is Jack Sheehan, a senior VP at Bechtel and a member of the Pentagon's influential Defense Policy Board. And then we have chairman and CEO Riley Bechtel, who in February was appointed by Bush to the hoity-toity President's Export Council.
Of course, using access, influence, and positions of ostensible public service to make a buck or two -- or, say, 680 million of them -- off Iraq is nothing new to the fine folks at Bechtel. They offer their customers the most precious commodity of all: experience. Back in the 1980s, the company wanted to build a pipeline to carry oil from Iraq to the Jordanian port of Aqaba -- a project ardently supported by the Reagan administration, which included Shultz and a fellow Bechtel alumnus, Secretary of Defense Casper Weinberger.
Backers of the Bechtel pipeline lined up a veritable Who's Who of former Reagan-Bush power players to push for the scheme, including former Secretary of Defense and CIA chief James Schlesinger, former National Security Advisor William Clark, former National Security Advisor Robert McFarlane, and former Attorney General Edwin Meese. I guess the thought being that all that political star power might help people forget Saddam's annoying little habit of gassing people.
And even though he wasn't on the Bechtel payroll, one of those working hardest to convince the Iraqis to hop into bed with the company was the macho man himself, Don "We Don't Need No Stinkin' Antiquities" Rumsfeld. While working as Reagan's special envoy to the Middle East in 1983, Rumsfeld met with Saddam personally and tried to convince him to sign on to Bechtel's pipeline pipe dream.
And Rummy isn't the only current administration official with a close encounter of the Bechtel kind on his CV. Andrew Natsios, administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development, the agency responsible for handing the lucrative Iraqi rebuilding contract to Bechtel, used to be in charge of overseeing Boston's "Big Dig," a massive highway project managed by Bechtel that went from a projected cost of $4.5 billion to an actual cost of $14 billion.
In a scathing letter sent to Natsios, the Massachusetts Inspector General called Bechtel's handling of the Big Dig "an invitation to fraud, waste and abuse." Apparently, this amounted to a sterling recommendation in Natsios' eyes because, three years later, when the time came to draw up the very short list of companies invited to bid on $1.5 billion in Iraq contracts, he didn't hesitate to include the old gang at Bechtel. Hey, what's a little "fraud, waste and abuse" among chums?
In today's business-loving Washington, a propensity for playing fast and loose with taxpayer money clearly qualifies as "no harm, no foul." It certainly hasn't hurt Halliburton, which, despite being fined $2 million for routinely overbilling the Pentagon, continues to land hugely profitable government contracts -- like the $2.2 billion it scored to provide troop support in the Balkans. According to a GAO study, the company boosted its bottom line by charging the Army $85 for plywood that cost $14, and racked up profits by cleaning the same base offices up to four times a day.
It goes without saying that everyone involved in these cushy deals denies any impropriety. In fact, they are downright offended by the suggestion that these contracts -- bid on by a very select group of well-connected companies, and awarded based on secretive, unexplained criteria -- were anything but on the up and up.
"We won this work on our record, plain and simple," crowed Riley Bechtel in an email to employees, making it sound as if their record of scheming and insider dealing was something to brag about. And a spokesman for the company assured reporters that Bechtel had not "attempted to bring any political pressure to bear." They didn't have to. When the fix is in, no one has to remind the referee to count to 10 when the chump takes his dive. It's all done with a wink and a nod. And sometimes not even that.
The perfect explanation for how this all works came from none other than Our Man in Baghdad, retired Gen. Jay Garner. When asked about his uncanny success as a businessman following his long military career -- especially how he helped Sy Technology boost its government contracts from $8.5 million in 1999 to $46.8 million in 2001, with much of that business coming from the Army division he used to run -- Garner replied: "I do not go to friends for business. I get business from my friends, but it's not solicited by me." Don Corleone couldn't have put it any better.
Here's another way of looking at the process: "The purpose behind the abuse," said Sen. Charles Grassley (R-Iowa), "was so that cronies of the president could win the spoils of political gain for themselves." Although Grassley's description suits the Bechtel pact to a tee, he was actually talking about Bill and Hillary's Travelgate.
Let's hope Sen. Grassley -- or anyone on his side of the aisle -- can muster a similar fit of indignation over a case of crony capitalism that makes Travelgate seems like a tempest in a Teapot Dome. .M.D., they can always hope.
Copyright © 1998-2002 Christabella, Inc.
http://www.ariannaonline.com/ |
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