Blood and Gravy II: The Jackal's Feast Goes On
|
Chris Floyd
25 October 2006
|
The picture below (from the New York Times) speaks most eloquently on the essence of the Bush Regime's brutal, grubby Babylonian Conquest: fat mercenaries guarding the construction of yet another prison.
The picture comes from a story on the "overhead costs" of reconstruction projects, based on a report by the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction, who found astonishing amounts of waste and cost overruns by the crony contractors who came to feast on the carcass that Bush killed for them. Two main points emerge from the report.
First, that the IG's catalogue of gouging, feather-bedding and other profitable
forms of war-profiteering is by no means complete, because "the United States has not properly tracked how much such expenses have taken from the $18.4 billion of taxpayer-financed reconstruction approved by Congress two years ago." In
fact, the IG's office was only able to examine only $1.3 billion of the contracts.
In other words, as oft reported here (and here and here), much of that money has simply disappeared -- into corporate coffers, into copious baksheesh for the Bush-backed Iraqi government, into kickbacks for Congressional vultures, and doubtless into slush funds both for covert ops (including perhaps the Bushists' deliberate fomenting of terrorism and arming of militias)
and domestic politics. We are most likely seeing the fruits of some of this
blood money wash up on American screens at this very moment, as the GOP's last-ditch "Smear and Fear" campaign goes into hyperdrive. The second salient point is the fact that most of this "overhead" is not
going toward security costs. Apologists for the Dear Leader's war crime have
been quick to answer any criticism of the woeful dearth of "reconstruction" --
and the fact that the Iraqi people now have lower levels of electricity, fuel,
health care, sanitation, etc. than before the invasion -- by blaming the colossal
waste and fraud on the insurgents. But the Inspector General -- appointed by
the Bush Administration itself -- tells us that the war-crime apologists are
dead wrong:
The
report said the prime reason was not the need to provide security, though
those costs have clearly risen in the perilous environment, and are a
burden that both contractors and American officials routinely blame for
such increases. Instead, the inspector general pointed to a simple bureaucratic
flaw: the United States ordered the contractors and their equipment to
Iraq and then let them sit idle for months at a time. The delay between "mobilization," or
assembling the teams in Iraq, and the start of actual construction was
as long as nine months.
"The government blew
the whistle for these guys to go to Iraq and the meter ran," said Jim
Mitchell, a spokesman for the inspector general's office. "The government
was billed for sometimes nine months before work began."
The findings are similar
to those of a growing list of inspections, audits and investigations that
have concluded that the program to rebuild Iraq has often fallen short for
the most mundane of reasons: poorly written contracts, ineffective or nonexistent
oversight, needless project delays and egregiously poor construction practices.
"This report is the
latest chapter in a long, sad and expensive tale about how contracting in
Iraq was more about shoveling money out the door than actually getting real
results on the ground," said Stephen Ellis, a vice president at Taxpayers
for Common Sense in Washington. "These contracts were to design and
build important items for oil infrastructure, hospitals and education, but
in some cases more than half of the money padded corporate coffers instead," he
said.
None of this is surprising.
War profiteering by favored corporate cronies was one of the primary benefits
envisaged by the Bush Regime as it drove so relentlessly and deceitfully toward
the baseless and unprovoked attack. This "waste" and "overhead" was and is a key part of the whole operation. Certainly, the betterment of Iraqi lives was far down the list of priorities for the "reconstruction" program. As we noted here last week, the whole war has been a cash cow that will swell the personal fortunes and fuel the partisan agenda of the Bush Faction players, even if they are turfed out of office in 2008. Thus it was inevitable that the $18 billion boondoggle would produce results like this:
The
report provided the first official estimate that, in some cases, more
money was being spent on housing and feeding employees, completing
paperwork and providing security than on actual construction. Those
overhead costs have ranged from under 20 percent to as much as 55 percent
of the budgets, according to the report.... On similar projects in
the United States, those costs generally run to a few percent.
The highest
proportion of overhead was incurred in oil-facility contracts won by KBR
Inc., the Halliburton subsidiary formerly known as Kellogg Brown & Root,
which has frequently been challenged by critics in Congress and elsewhere.
The latter finding
on KBR is "news" on the order of "sun rises in the east" or "pigs eat swill." In
fact, Halliburton's unconscionable gulping of blood money --
and the fact that Dick Cheney still receives huge annual sums from the company
-- are so well-established now that they pass almost unnoticed. "Halliburton, Cheney, yeah, everybody knows that. Even Leno's stopped telling jokes about it." This
stark corruption -- an unprecedented scandal in American history: a sitting vice-president
openly taking cash from a war industry during a war of which he himself is a
prime instigator -- has almost lost its power to shock.
(Of course, KBR
played a very similar role during the Vietnam War,
when huge wads of its massive war profits were certainly kicked back to serving
politicians like Lyndon Johnson and others in the then-Democratic majority,
as well as to key Republicans. But in those days, bought pols had the decency
to trouser their bribes on the QT, not serve openly on the payroll. Here, as
in so many things, the Bush Regime is openly embracing -- and often codifying
in law -- dark practices once thought shameful to acknowledge. I suppose we
must at least admire their refreshing candor in being so forthrightly corrupt,
bloodthirsty and belligerent.)
The IG's report
is devastating: but again, all this waste was built into the system from
the start. Halliburton and the other swill-swallowers were given "cost-plus" contracts
(many of them simply handed out like Halloween candy, without any of that silly-billy
nonsense about competitive bidding). This means that they are guaranteed a
certain set profit, no matter how far their costs balloon. There is simply
no incentive for them to even try to bring a project in at cost -- or indeed,
to even complete it at all. There's just too money to be made by running up
the meter, throwing away material and buying it again, cutting lucrative side
deals with suppliers (and re-suppliers), mercenaries, local officials, etc.
This ethos of waste,
corruption and utter disregard for the money of the American people -- and
the lives and well-being of the Iraqi people -- is characteristic
of the entire malevolent enterprise. A war of aggression launched without any
justification whatsoever beyond the greed and power-lust of a band of corrupt
authoritarian militarists -- led by two men who squirmed and weaseled mightily
to avoid combat in their youths but have no compunction whatsoever about sending
other people off to kill and die -- was bound to produce the
moral horror that we see in Iraq today. And
make no mistake -- despite all the White House PR about "timetables" and strategy
shifts, despite the rising hopes of ousting Bush's bootlicking rubberstamps
from control of the Congress, the stark truth (which
I noted here in May) remains: There
is no good solution to the hell Bush has wrought in his
arrogance and folly. There is only blood and horror all the way down.
|
|