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Why Are We In Iraq?
Evelyn Pringle e.pringle@sbcglobal.net
In the months leading up to the war in Iraq, administration officials convinced us that we had to go to war to get rid of Saddam's WMDs. They used repeated phrases like: "we know," "beyond any doubt," and "these are not assertions, these are facts." But as we all know now, all of their assertions (aka, facts) turned out to be false. In plain language, they lied their way into this war.
People need to think about this. If it wasn't truly necessary to go to war in Iraq to protect ourselves from Saddam and WMDs, then what other reason would justify a preemptive attack on another country?
For me, the answer came easy. All I had to do was follow the money. Who stood to gain from military action? Look up the main companies that were awarded defense contracts and then check to see who within the Bush administration is connected to those companies, past and present.
Of course, everybody has heard of Halliburton, a poster child for war profiteering that has gone the full financial circle in Iraq. It was enriched doing business with Saddam when Cheney was running the company, by selling $73 million in oil-field supplies through subsidiaries in foreign countries.
Then it got richer during preparations to destroy Iraq. On the very day Congress voted in favor of the resolution, someone in the Pentagon picked up a phone and told Halliburton it had 9 weeks to build an Army base for 7,000 soldiers.
Now its getting even richer through contracts to rebuild the country it helped destroy. And they owe it all to Cheney. While he was Bush Sr.'s secretary of defense, he directed millions of tax dollars in government business to Halliburton. Then when he left his government job, he cashed in by becoming the company's CEO and the largest individual shareholder, holding stocks and options worth $40 million.
While Cheney was in charge, Halliburton's offshore tax havens went from 9 to 44. In 1998, it subsequently went from paying $302 million in federal taxes to getting an $85 million refund in 1999.
It is also a notorious corporate criminal. Under Cheney's watch, it was fined $2 million for persistently over billing the Pentagon. However, they did not learn their lesson. It is once again being investigated for over billing for transporting gasoline by $61 million and $27 million for meals served to our troops that were never served. It also had to admit that 2 employees accepted $6.3 million in kickbacks from a Kuwaiti subcontractor to ignore over billing in a contract.
Finally, Halliburton is now being investigated, here and abroad, for paying Nigeria government officials $180 million in bribes to gain a $3.8 billion contract while Cheney was CEO.
When is enough enough? Why are we doing any business with this corrupt company in the first place?
I find it difficult to understand the media's kid-glove treatment of the Halliburton scandals and of members of the Bush administration in general, when I consider how they handled allegations about Clinton's 20-year-old land deal in which the Clintons lost money. For some odd reason the media has done very little reporting on the financial scandals involving Cheney.
Halliburton is by far not the only firm involved in this grand war profiteering scheme. Its track record is merely a part of a larger pattern in which many of Bush's relatives and close associates benefit financially from the Iraq war.
For instance, former president George H. W. Bush resigned in the fall of 2003 from a company called the Carlyle Group (but he still owns stock). This company is heavily associated with military and security contracts. It received $677 million in contracts in 2002 and $2.1 billion in contracts in 2003.
Bush's younger brother Neil has a $60,000-per-year contract with a principal in Washington-based New Bridge Strategies, a private firm set up by Bush's former campaign manager, to generate contracts in Iraq.
A $327 million contract that was awarded to the U.S. Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq, benefits Winston Partners, the private investment firm of Bush's other brother Marvin Bush.
In the history of this country, there has never been a more clear cut case of war profiteering. We may find it difficult to face the truth, that yes, these greedy people not only would, they did, send our young people off to be killed in Iraq because they stood to gain financially.
Its time for Americans to face the cold hard fact that war is big business and the Bush administration is top-heavy with CEOs.
I am a citizen concerned over the war in Iraq.