Bollettino

As liberation nears, and the irrepressible Iraqi will turns to the man whose picture is, secretly, in every Iraqi home (we mean smilin' Jay Garner, the American proconsul in waiting, who, if he could speak Arabic, would give a big shout out to all his Shi'ia buddies) we should contemplate how gracefully America is monetizing that gratitude. There's a nice piece by Frida Berrigan in In These Times (for which yours truly has written) concerning the Cheney-Halliburton connection. Dick Cheney chose to take his compensation from Halliburton (for moving down to a post as a Halliburton lobbyist - oops, I mean as Vice President of the United States), which comes out to between $100,000 and $1,000,000 per annum. And Brown and Root, everybody's favorite engineering squad, and a Halliburton subsidiary, seems on schedule for cleaning up in the great post-liberation afterwards:

"Critics argue that the U.S. Agency for International Development ignored the expertise and experience of well-regarded NGOs with decades of experience in humanitarian work in Iraq in their secretive contract process. USAID asked just five for-profit corporations to submit bids for $900 million in reconstruction contracts for the initial phase of work, scheduled to last just six months. Of course, these companies will be best situated to win billions in future contracts. An American Academy of Arts and Sciences report estimated that the reconstruction of Iraq could cost anywhere from $30 billion to $105 billion over the next decade.

KBR not only has the corner on postwar reconstruction, they were also granted a potentially huge contract to fight oil well fires throughout Iraq, even though they did not submit a bid for the job. In November, the Pentagon hired KBR to write a classified contingency plan for dealing with the fires, allowing the company to position itself for this job long before the war was a fait accompli. President Bush just asked Congress for $500 million for oil field repair, and KBR is standing by to take the money."

Sweet! Of course, it helps that Iraqi proconsul Garner is himself making a small pile on the war. As is Richard Perle. Berrigan could have included a link to Waters website, where there is a press release concerning her amendment. Here?s the link. We don't imagine this story is going to be coming to your local paper anytime soon.