Halliburton, Cheney, Corruption
So far, other than the irregularities at Halliburton, there has been no evidence of large-scale corruption in the rebuilding of Iraq. But a number of friends of the Administration have landed important positions, and others have obtained large contracts. For instance, Peter McPherson, who took a leave from his job as president of Michigan State University to serve as Paul Bremer’s economic deputy in Iraq, has been friends with Cheney since they both served in Gerald Ford’s White House. The head of private-sector development at the C.P.A., one of the most powerful posts in Iraq, is Thomas Foley, a Connecticut-based business-school classmate of President Bush, who later became finance chairman for Bush’s Presidential campaign in Connecticut. Foley was a “pioneer,” meaning that he raised more than a hundred thousand dollars for Bush.
Last month, an inspector general was appointed for the C.P.A., as required by Congress when it approved the President’s eighty-seven-billion-dollar supplemental budget for Iraq last year. Rather than choosing a nonpartisan outsider for this watchdog role, as most government agencies do, the Administration selected Stuart Bowen, Jr., who spent two years as White House counsel in the Bush Administration. According to The Hill, a Washington newspaper, L. Marc Zell, a former law partner of Douglas Feith, the Under-Secretary of Defense for Policy, is helping with international marketing for a concern called the Iraqi International Law Group. Billing itself as a group of lawyers and businessmen interested in helping investors in Iraq, the venture is run by Ahmed Chalabi’s nephew Salem, who doubles as a legal adviser to Iraq’s governing council, of which his uncle is a member.
Tom Korologos, a well-connected Republican lobbyist in Washington, recently took a temporary assignment as a senior counsellor to Bremer. Korologos acknowledged that Washington lobbyists are scrambling to solicit business in Iraq. “By definition, it’s going to boom, because of the numbers,” he said. “The question is who’s going to get the contracts. There’s a lot of money. Somebody’s got to build the bridges and roads.” He added that talk of political influence over the process was “bullshit.”
Yet a look at one prominent defense contractor, Science Applications International Corporation, based in San Diego, suggests the importance of connections. One of its board members is Army General Wayne Downing, who commanded the Special Forces in the first Gulf War and ran counterterrorism in the Bush White House for the better part of a year after September 11th. During that time, he accompanied Cheney on visits to the C.I.A. to discuss U.S. intelligence on Iraq. For years, Downing has been an unpaid adviser to Ahmed Chalabi and the Iraqi National Congress, and he was an early advocate of armed insurrection against the old Iraqi regime. S.A.I.C.’s seven Iraq contracts are worth fifty million dollars.
It is unclear what special expertise S.A.I.C. brings to several of its contracts. One company executive, who asked not to be named, said that its chief credential for setting up what was supposed to be an independent media for Iraq, modelled on the BBC, was military work in “informational warfare”—signal jamming, “perception management,” and the like. Some of S.A.I.C.’s government contracts require that specific individuals—referred to as “executive management consultants”—be paid more than two hundred dollars an hour. One contract cites a man named Owen Kirby as someone who will advise Iraqis on the process of building democracy. Kirby is a program director of the International Republican Institute, an organization devoted to promoting democracy abroad. In October, 2001, the group gave its Freedom Award to Dick Cheney. Before that, it gave the award to Lynne Cheney.
It is not surprising that Cheney, after five years of running Halliburton, a company that considers war as providing “growth opportunities,” regards winning the peace in Iraq as a challenge for private enterprise as well as for government. Yet it is reasonable to ask if Cheney’s faith in companies like Halliburton contributed to his conviction that the occupation of Iraq would be a tidy, easily managed affair. Now that Cheney’s vision has been shown to be overly optimistic, and Iraqis and American soldiers are still getting killed ten months after Saddam’s overthrow, critics are questioning the propriety of a reconstruction effort that is fuelled by the profit motive. “I’m appalled that the war is being used by people close to the Bush Administration to make money for themselves,” Waxman said. “At a time when we’re asking young men and women to make perhaps the ultimate sacrifice, it’s just unseemly.” Many of those involved, however, see themselves as part of a democratic vanguard. Jack Kemp’s spokesman, P. J. Johnson, told me, “We’re doing good by doing well.” Joe Allbaugh, Bush’s former campaign manager, who has established New Bridge Strategies, a firm aimed specifically at setting up for-profit ventures in Iraq, makes no apologies. “We are proud of the leadership the American private sector is taking in the reconstruction of Iraq,” he said.
Another top Republican lobbyist in Washington, Charlie Black, told me that his firm, BKSH & Associates, has plans to help Iraqis set up their own affiliated public-relations and government-relations firm; the company would become perhaps the first lobbying shop in Baghdad. Black is excited by the opportunities in Iraq, but he, too, has complaints. “The problem in Iraq so far is it’s slow, and very confusing for people to figure out how to do business there,” he said. “One week you go to Baghdad, and they say the decisions are being made at the Pentagon. Then you go to the Pentagon, and they say the decisions are being made in Baghdad. Only Halliburton is making money now!” He laughed. “Is there too much cronyism? I just wish I could find the cronies.”
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