Halliburton Spinoff KBR Made $39.5 Billion from the Iraq War

Cheney and Rumsfeld, Image via NPR 

When Dick Cheney and his henchman moved into the White House in 2001, they ignored warnings of Bin Laden determined to attack inside the US. They told terrorist experts to shut up. Cheney was supposed to have meetings on the subject, but didn't. John Ashcroft told agents investigating the possible attacks to get out of his office and not come back with such stuff.

Instead, almost from day one, they were focused on Iraq. The PNAC had famously said they would need a "Pearl Harbor" type event to intervene and rebuild the Middle East into a Freshwater "Free" Market Utopia. And just hours after they got their "event," Donald Rumsfeld was ordering his aides to come up with a plan to attack Iraq.

"Go massive," the notes quote him as saying. "Sweep it all up. Things related and not."

The twin towers were steaming piles of rubble and body parts. The Pentagon was still smoldering. Rumsfeld knew of intel pointing to Al Qaeda. And what did he do? He ordered plans for an attack on Iraq.

I've spent far too many hours of my life thinking about the reasons that Rummy and Cheney were so obsessed with Iraq. They had grudges. They truly believed their own BS. They wanted to finish what they thought was unfinished business. But after years of contemplating, and thinking that all these reasons played a part, one old standard for political reasoning still stands out: follow the money.

Dick Cheney's Halliburton spinoff, KBR received more money from the Iraq war than any other contractor.

The company was given $39.5 billion in Iraq-related contracts over the past decade, with many of the deals given without any bidding from competing firms, such as a $568-million contract renewal in 2010 to provide housing, meals, water and bathroom services to soldiers, a deal that led to a Justice Department lawsuit over alleged kickbacks, as reported by Bloomberg.

 That $39.5 billion to KBR was almost triple what the number two and three highest paid Iraq War contractors got. KBR received over 28% of the $138 billion in taxpayer funds spent on the war. And corruption and profit sucked as much as 60% right into the pockets of the war profiteers.

According to the bipartisan Commission on Wartime Contracting in Iraq and Afghanistan, the level of corruption by defense contractors may be as high as $60 billion.

Cheney calls Iraq War a success. Image via Crooks and Liars.

Cheney's stock options and deferred salary from Halliburton amounted to direct payments to the warmonger for moving from private business into a government position from which he could send no-bid contracts to the his former company. This gigantic payoff for starting the war might be one of the biggest cons ever conducted on the American taxpayer.

Despite his obvious corruption, disregard for truth, law, and basic human dignity, people still listen to what he says--his opinion is still treated as worthy of attention by a frighteningly large segment of the American public, many of whom also profited from the war.

Taken together, the Iraq war and the housing crash are ample proof that the neo-con and supply side hucksters have figured out that the key to getting away with the largest crimes in human history is to go massive.

The Great Iraq Swindle

Bush didn't invade Iraq to find weapons. Hell, he was told there were no weapons there, and didn't care. He didn't even do it for the oil. He did it because the neo-cons orchestrated the largest swindle of American taxpayers in the history of the country.

Operation Iraqi Freedom, it turns out, was never a war against Saddam ­Hussein's Iraq. It was an invasion of the federal budget, and no occupying force in history has ever been this efficient. George W. Bush's war in the Mesopotamian desert was an experiment of sorts, a crude first take at his vision of a fully privatized American government. In Iraq the lines between essential government services and for-profit enterprises have been blurred to the point of absurdity -- to the point where wounded soldiers have to pay retail prices for fresh underwear, where modern-day chattel are imported from the Third World at slave wages to peel the potatoes we once assigned to grunts in KP, where private companies are guaranteed huge profits no matter how badly they fuck things up.

And just maybe, reviewing this appalling history of invoicing orgies and million-dollar boondoggles, it's not so far-fetched to think that this is the way someone up there would like things run all over -- not just in Iraq but in Iowa, too, with the state police working for Corrections Corporation of America, and DHL with the contract to deliver every Christmas card. And why not? What the Bush administration has created in Iraq is a sort of paradise of perverted capitalism, where revenues are forcibly extracted from the customer by the state, and obscene profits are handed out not by the market but by an unaccountable government bureauc­racy. This is the triumphant culmination of two centuries of flawed white-people thinking, a preposterous mix of authoritarian socialism and laissez-faire profit­eering, with all the worst aspects of both ideologies rolled up into one pointless, supremely idiotic military adventure -- American men and women dying by the thousands, so that Karl Marx and Adam Smith can blow each other in a Middle Eastern glory hole.

Go read it. And then I dare one of you fucking Republican Bush lovers to come back here and tell me why this glorious clusterfuck is good for my children, who will be paying for it.