War Profiteering

There has been oodles of buzz in the comments section for the last few days about whether this is a war fought for financial gain. While Harry Truman called war profiteering during WWII treason, this administration seems to consider it just the course of business.

The most glaring example of war profiteering during the current Iraqi war is, of course, Halliburton, of which Vice President Cheney was chief executive before entering office. Cheney continues to receive a six-figure yearly pension and retains stock options worth an estimated $18 million dollars. Meanwhile, Halliburton stock has quadrupled in value since the beginning of the Iraq war.

There's always the long shot that it wasn't Cheney who encouraged the arm forces to give billions of dollars in contracts to Halliburton (and exact number of billions is apparently not know, not even by the government); it could be the nearly $18,000 they gave to the Bush/Cheney 2000 campaign that makes this administration feel beholden to them. They, along with the 70 or so other companies with Iraqi contracts have donated more money to Bush than any other candidate in the last two decades. Hmm - I wonder what they knew then?

Regardless of why specific companies were chosen, contractors were supposedly used to reduce the cost of the war... which makes it seem odd that we have paid Halliburton subsidiary Kellogg, Brown & Root an estimated $13 billion just for supplies and equipment maintenance for our armed forces. Adjusted for inflation, this is about two and a half times what we spent on the entire 1991 Gulf War and about the same expense of the American Revolution, the War of 1912, the Mexican-American War, and the Spanish American War combined.

A quick dig into the articles about the outsourcing of this war quickly brings to light that filtering tax-payer money through the government and into the pockets of corporate executives is one of the nicest results. A billion + dollar contract with L-3 Communication was used in part to pay contractors to perform some of the heinous torture witnessed in the Abu Ghraib pictures. Of course, while the members of the military who have the honor of taking the fall for the higher-ups who sanctioned the torture rot in their prison cells, these contractors perpetrating the same crimes have nothing to fear thanks to their protected status.

You know, the more I dig, the sicker I get, and the more I mourn what the Bush administration has taken away from us. In all fairness, though, the channels of profit rarely seem to point at the President himself; perhaps for him it is all about power, which he has been gathering like a greedy school kid with a box of crayons. Sadly, in this case, each crayon represents what were once the checks and balances that made this country so great - he is truly working toward a government that looks a lot like a dictatorship.

So yes, David, this has been a very sad year as I have watched a small group of people take the greatest country in the world and turn it into a shameful, fascist state. I am truly, deeply sad.

The saddest part of all is that while I am writing all of this, I can't help but think of the trampling of the Geneva Conventions that was passed yesterday which not only allows the President to order torture and detain people without charge indefinitely, but is worded so loosely that not even American citizens are protected. Were my words construed as aiding terrorism, I too could be locked up, uncharged, for the rest of time. And this the administration so many of you still defend?