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Today's
Stories
March 6 / 7, 2004
Alexander Cockburn
Understanding the World with
Paul Sweezy
March 5, 2004
Chris Floyd
Uncle
Sugar: How the WMD Scam Put Money in Bush Family Pockets
Ron Jacobs
Chaos
Reigns: Haiti and Iraq
Lisa Viscidi
Guatemalan
Refugees: a Difficult Return
Yves Engler
Canada and the Coup in Haiti
Mike Legro
Those Bush Ads: Some Dead Bodies Are Worth More Than Others
Javier Armas
A Night of Inspiration: Oakland Benefit for Grocery Workers Strike
Bennett Hoffman
"Who Cares About Haiti, Anyway?"
Bill Christison
Faltering Neo-Cons Still Dangerous
Website of the Day
Haiti Support Group
March 4, 2004
Diane Christian
Sex
and Ideals
Sen. Robert Byrd
Stop the Stonewalling, Mr. President: Fairy Tales, Bush and the
9/11 Commission
Norman Solomon
Assuming the Right to Intervene: The US Press and Haiti
Jack Brown
A Fragrant Saga of Mexico's Greens
Hal Cranmer
The
John Kerry Experience
David Lindorff
Greenspan's Pension
Sam Smith
The Election is Over, We Lost
Christopher Brauchli
Goin'
to the Chapel: The Gay and the Dead
Brian D. Barry
The "Perfect" World of E-Voting: A Computer Scientist
Reports from the Polling Booth
Richard Oxman
Arsonists for Haiti?
Peter Phillips
Haitian
Fantasies: Mainstream Media Fails Itself, Again
Tariq Ali
Notes on Anti-Semitism, Zionism and
Palestine
Website of the Day
What If Boeing Ads Told the Truth?
March 3, 2004
Heather Williams / Karl
Laraque
Marines
Retake Haiti
Jack McCarthy
Guy's
Our Guy: "I am the Chief. My Hero is Pinochet."
Robert Sandels
The
Purloined Label: The Struggle Over the Havana Club Trademark
Juliana Fredman / James Davis
Israeli Organized Crime
JG
The Yuppie Silence on Haiti
Emilio Sardi
The
Colombia/US Free Trade Deal: It's About More Than Trade
Alan Farago
Swimming in Sewage
Mike Whitney
"Blood
Will Have Blood": 143 Murdered in Liberated Iraq
CounterPunch Wire
Nader's Legislative Record in the 1960s
Steve Perry
Kerry
Advisory: Remember Lena Guerrero
Nelson George/ Marcus Miller
Miles Davis & Hip Hop: a Conversation
Website of the Day
$10,000 Is Yours for the Taking: The USS Liberty Challenge
March 2, 2004
William Blum
If Kerry's
the Answer, What's the Question?
Conn Hallinan
Haiti:
the Dangerous Muddle
JoAnn Wypijewski
The Bravo
H-Bomb Test: One WMD They Couldn't Hide
Mike Whitney
Regime Change in Haiti: the Bush Dominos Keep Falling
Ra Ravishankar
Afghanistan, the Liberation That Isn't: an Interview with Mariam
from RAWA
Dan Bacher
Merle Haggard & the Politics of Salmon: "Clearcutting
is Rape"
Greg Moses
Oscar White
Brandy Baker
Mel Gibson's Minstrelsy Show
Little Tucker Carlson
What I Did on My Vacation
Robert Fisk
All This
Talk of Civil War, Now This
Merle Haggard
Kern River
Website of the Day
Rebel Edit
March 1, 2004
Alexander Cockburn
Morris
Thanks War Criminal in Front of Billions
Richard Oxman
Oscar's
Obit: Thanking Bob McNamara
Elaine Cassel
Writing and Reading as "Terrorism"
Mickey Z
Thomas Friedman's Education
Mike Whitney
George Will and Anti-Semitism: a Cul-de-Sac of Prejudice
Heather Williams
Haiti
as Target Practice: How the US Press Missed the Story
Cathy Crosson
Chanson d'amour haïtienne
Website of the Day
God Hates Shrimp
February 28 / 29, 2004
Stephen Green
Serving
Two Flags: Neo-Cons, Israel and the Bush Team
Gary Leupp
Another Senseless Bush Battle: Defining and Protecting Marriage
William A. Cook
Israel:
America's Albatross
Ron Jacobs
Kucinich: Good Fight; Wrong Battlefield
Ben Tripp
A Nosegay of Posies: Queer Weddings at Last!
Leilla Matsui
Dances with Crucifixes
Mike Whitney
Dismantle
the Military Goliath
Yoel Marcus
Down and Out in the Hague
Uri Avnery
The Dancing Bear
Linda S. Heard
Britons and Americans Condemned to a Hobson's Choice
Al Krebs
Unmasking a Secret American Empire: Land, Water & Cotton
Stan Cox
Life (Pat. Pend.): Genetic Commandeering
JG
The Haiti Boomerang: "After The Looting & Pillaging,
Your Hunger Will Remain"
Rick Giombetti
Censorship at the Seattle P-I on Forced Psychiatry
Keith Hoeller
The Bankruptcy of Mental Health Insurance Parity
Dave Zirin
Colorado Football: Buffalo Swill
NADERAMA
Alan Maass
Nader and the Politics of Lesser
Evils
Michael Donnelly
Regime
Rotation: Anybody But Bush...Again?
Niranjan Ramakrishnan
Exeunt Serenaders; Enter Nader
Doug Giebel
So Nader's Running? Get Over It
Bruce Jackson
An Open Letter to Naderites
CounterPunch Wire
Stalinists for Kerry! and Other Roars from the Crowd
Poets' Basement
Davies, Scarr, Kearney & Albert
February 27, 2004
Thomas C. Mountain
A
White Jesus During Black History Month?
Laura Carlsen
Americans
Abroad: Bush is Persona Non Grata
John B. Anderson
Nader's Campaign Brings Back Memories: Creating an Open Electoral
Process
Jason Leopold
Spying
on Kofi Annan
John Chuckman
Nader,
Risk and Hope
Standard Schaefer
An
Interview with Michael Hudson on Putin's Russia
Ray McGovern
Punished
for Honest Intelligence
Saul Landau
The
Haiti Redux
Website of the Day
Bush: Why I'm Running for Re-election
February 26, 2004
Brandy Baker
Is Nader
on to Something?
Jacques Kinau
AEI
to Colombia: "Can't Give You Anything But Guns, Baby"
Norman Solomon
Bugging Kofi Annan: UN Spying
and the Evasions of US Journalism
Greg Weiher
A Purloined Letter: the Zarqawi Gambit
Walt Brasch
Janet Jackson, Bush & No. 542: There are No Halftime Shows
in War
Shadi Hamid
The Music World Explodes in Anger
Norman Madarasz
As Canadian as Corruption
Chris Floyd
Bullets and Ballots
Virginia Tilly
The
Deeper Meaning of the Wall
Amy Goodman / Jeremy
Scahill
Haiti's
Lawyer Says US is Arming Haiti's Anti-Aristide Paramilitaries
Website of the Day
Clear Channel Sucks
February 25, 2004
Dr. Susan Block
Saddam's
Sex Therapist and the Rape of Free Speech
Bruce Anderson
Treacherous Bastards: The Greens and the Dems and Nader
Ron Jacobs
Our Power is on the Streets and
in Our Hearts
Mike Whitney
Bush
and Gay America: the Politics of Duplicity
Sam Husseini
Jesus in 100 Words
John L. Hess
Kick Off or Flub?
Sam Hamod
Bush's Newest Red Herring
Cockburn / St. Clair
Winning
with Nader
Website of the Day
VotePact
February 24, 2004
Ralph Nader
Why
I'm Running for President
Greg Moses
Rally
the Mob! Bush, Gay Marriage and the Constitution
Douglas O'Hara
The
Merchants of Fear: Smearing Nader
Phillip Cryan
Frozen in Time: The WSJ's Paranoid
Lens on Latin America
David Lindorff
John Kerry's China Connection
Jason Leopold
Cheney's Shame: Halliburton Faces New Charges
Gary Younge
Haiti: Throttled by History
Kromm, Masri & Purohit
Why No Democracy in Iraq?
Steve Perry
Tangled Up in Red and Blue: Beware the Electoral College
February 23, 2004
Neve Gordon
Israel's Apartheid Wall on Trial
at The Hague
Kurt Nimmo
Richard Perle, Executioner: "Heads Should Roll"
Jonathan Franklin
US Soldier Seeks Refugee Status in Canada
Al Krebs
The Liberal "Intelligentsia" v. Nader
Josh Frank
Nader's Nadir? Not a Chance
Bruce Jackson
Nader, Another View: "He's as Evil as Bush"
Gary Leupp
A Misguided
Attack, The Passion, Rabbi Lerner and the Gospels
February 20 / 22, 2004
Cockburn / St. Clair
Kerry:
He's Peaking Already!
Derek Seidman
Chasing
Judith Miller from the Stage: Watch Her Run!
Ghada Karmi
Sharon is not the Problem
Vanessa Jones
This Week in Redfern, a Boy Dies, Chased by Cops
Ben Granby
Anatomy of a Night Raid on Balad, Iraq
John Holt
An Air That Kills: Greed, Apathy, Dead People
Saul Landau
Entry from a White House Diary
Tom Jackson
Why They Couldn't Wait to Invade Iraq
Frederick B. Hudson
Slave Power and the Constitution: Jefferson, Slaves, Haiti and
Hypocrisy
Roger Burbach
Argentina Fights Back
Kate Doyle
Lessons on Justice from Guatemala
Mike Whitney
Operation Enduring Misery: the Afghanistan Debacle
Greg Moses
What Gives Texas A&M the Right to Trample the Civil Rights
Act?
David Krieger
US Elections: an Opportunity to Debate Nuclear Weapons
Sam Bahour
Palestinian Issue Riddles Bush's Budget
David Grenier
You Could Get 10 Years in Prison Just for Reading This
Charles Sullivan
Corporatism vs. Single Party Politics
Poet's Basement
Hilda White, Larry Kearney & Stew Albert
Website of the Weekend
The Rumsfeld Fighting Technique
February 19, 2004
Cecilie Surasky
Anti-Semitism
at the World Social Forum? That's Not What I Saw
Ray McGovern
Iraq
Hawks and Deceptive Intelligence: Did They Really Think They'd
Get Away With It?
Tariq Ali
How Far
Will Bush Go in Iraq?
Ralph Nader
Whither
the Nation?
Wayne Madsen
Would Kerry Purge the Neo-Cons?
Norman Solomon
The Collapse of Dean's Cyber-Bubble
Christopher Brauchli
Cheney, Halliburton and the NYT
Mike Whitney
Bush's Iraq Strategy: "I Hope They Kill Each Other"
Lewis Carroll
Bush the Mighty Helmsman from Yale
Website of the Day
Sex Toy Horoscope
February 18, 2004
William Wilgus
Bush:
AWOL and Dereliction of Duty
William Blum
Mush-Minded
Liberals
Dave Lindorff
Bush's China Syndrome
Greg Weiher
Why
is Kerry Getting a Pass?
Mike Griffin
Killing the Messenger: the AFL-CIO's Attack on Harry Kelber
Mark Hand
Kerry Tells Peace Movement to "Move On"
February 17, 2004
Mike Ferner
The
Countryside Murders in Iraq
Mokhiber / Weissman
Corporation
as Psychopath
Marjorie Cohn
DrakeGate:
a Victory for Free Speech
Kurt Nimmo
Bush's
Endgame: a Review of Chalmers Johnson's "Sorrows of Empire"
Greg Bates
Nader Ambush: a New Low for The
Nation
Ximena Ortiz
A Bush
Doctrine, of Sorts
Gary Leupp
Whatever Happened to Gen. Khazraji?
Sen. John Kerry
"The Cause of Israel is the Cause of America"
Steve Perry
Kerry
1, Drudge 0
February 16, 2004
James Johnston
Huddling
with the Cheeseheads in a NASCAR World
Sara Eltantawi
To
Wear the Hijab or Not
Bruce Anderson
Kevin
Cooper and the Midnight Needle
Elaine Cassel
Feds
on Campus: the Drake Subpoenas
Rahul Mahajan
Bush,
Is the Tide Finally Turning?
Kevin Cooper
The Ritual of Death
Stan Cox
Goodbye, Howard Dean
Larry David
My War
Steve Perry
Bush and the Guard: the Cover-Up's the Thing
Website of the Day
Prison Patriots: Help This Vital Film Get Made
Hot Stories
Alexander Cockburn
Behold,
the Head of a Neo-Con!
Subcomandante Marcos
The
Death Train of the WTO
Norman Finkelstein
Hitchens
as Model Apostate
Steve Niva
Israel's
Assassination Policy: the Trigger for Suicide Bombings?
Dardagan,
Slobodo and Williams
CounterPunch Exclusive:
20,000 Wounded Iraqi Civilians
Steve
J.B.
Prison Bitch
Sheldon
Rampton and John Stauber
True Lies: the Use of Propaganda
in the Iraq War
Wendell
Berry
Small Destructions Add Up
CounterPunch
Wire
WMD: Who Said What When
Cindy
Corrie
A Mother's Day Talk: the Daughter
I Can't Hear From
Gore Vidal
The
Erosion of the American Dream
Francis Boyle
Impeach
Bush: A Draft Resolution
Click Here
for More Stories.
|
Weekend
Edtion
March 6 / 7, 2004
The High Cost of Privatized
Warfare
Iraq and the Costs of War
By WILLIAM D. HARTUNG
Halliburton's role in Iraq has been deeply scrutinized
in the past few months but its implications go far beyond one
company or one conflict. The real issue at hand is determining
how to best provide effective support for our men and women in
uniform, at a reasonable cost, with transparency and accountability.
That's true in Iraq, or Afghanistan, or the Philippines, or Colombia,
or Kosovo, or Liberia, or anywhere else American military personnel
are sent on short notice to face down tyrants or keep the peace.
Problems with the
Estimation Game: The Hidden Costs of War
Wars are costly undertakings. They almost
always cost more than government officials claim they will. Yale
economist William D. Nordhaus has suggested that governments
have an incentive to understate the costs of conflict because
"If wars are thought to be short, cheap, and bloodless,
then it is easier to persuade the populace and the Congress to
defer to the President." 1 Robert Hormats, the Vice-Chairman
of Goldman Sachs International, observed during the run-up to
the current war in Iraq:
History is littered with gross underestimates
of the cost of war. Lincoln originally thought the civil war
could last 90 days. His Treasury told him it would cost $250
million. It lasted four years and cost $3.3 billion. The First
World War was originally forecast to be short and inexpensive.
The Vietnam war cost 90% more than forecast. 2
Even conflicts that appear at first to
be relatively "cheap," like the 1991 Persian Gulf War,
often end up having substantial, hidden, long-term costs. In
that conflict, the bulk of the $76 billion in direct war costs
were paid for by U.S. allies, and U.S. combat deaths were relatively
low, at 148 personnel lost. But more than a decade later, U.S.
taxpayers are absorbing billions of dollars in costs for treating
the service-related injuries and disabilities of the veterans
of that conflict. More than one-third of the veterans of the
1990/1991 Gulf War--over 206,000 in all--have filed for service-related
disabilities, and as of early 2003, more than 159,000 of those
claims had been approved. This extraordinary "postwar casualty
rate" puts the lie to the idea that the first Gulf War was
either a cheap or easy victory. 3
Likewise, when former White House economic
adviser Lawrence Lindsey suggested to the Wall Street Journal
in September of 2002 that a U.S. intervention in Iraq could cost
about 2% of our Gross Domestic Product--roughly $200 billion--the
White House quickly dismissed his estimate. A few months later,
they also dismissed Lindsey from his post as White House economic
adviser. Roughly a year and a half after Lindsey made his prediction,
and less than a year into the war in Iraq, his rough guess is
beginning to look like a gross underestimate of the cost of intervening
in Iraq. To date, U.S. taxpayers have committed roughly $180
billion to the buildup  to war, the overthrow of Saddam
Hussein's regime, and the ongoing occupation and rebuilding effort
in Iraq . That doesn't count the costs of "buying allies"
through special aid and trade deals, or any projections forward
of how long we may have "boots on the ground" in Iraq.
And it is unlikely in an election year that this administration
will be forthcoming about future costs. It will pretend they
don't exist--as with the failure to budget for war costs in the
FY 2005 budget documents--or let them out in dribs and drabs
as with the recently floated $50 billion supplemental request.
The biggest source of the underestimate
in the case of this war was the notion among some in this administration
that the war would be a "cakewalk," and that once Saddam
Hussein's regime had crumbled, building a functioning democracy
in Iraq would be a relatively straightforward, inexpensive affair.
In fact, Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz and AID administrator
Andrew Natsios cited figures as low as $1.5 billion for Iraqi
rebuilding, on the theory that most of the funds could come from
the sale of Iraqi oil. This is particularly ironic when we consider
that some of the charges of fraud and abuse relating to Halliburton
have to do with overcharges in the importation of fuel into Iraq.
As for hidden human costs of this war,
we are already past 500 deaths of our military personnel, and
combat injuries are occurring at a much higher rate than in the
first Gulf War. In addition, because it is an occupation and
not an air war, there is a need to keep an eye on trauma-related
issues for veterans returning from Iraq--the impact of seeing
friends and fellow unit members killed and maimed, of serving
in close combat, of seeing the impacts of the years of brutality
that Saddam Hussein imposed on his own people, and so forth.
U.S. combat personnel should get all the support they need to
process these experiences, which will undoubtedly include needs
for traditional health care as well as psychological and emotional
support services. This will cost money, and it is not something
that we can in good conscience cut corners on now that our troops
are in harm's way in a very difficult situation in Iraq . If
contracts with companies like Halliburton are "indefinite
cost, indefinite quantity," our social contract to meet
the ongoing needs of the men and women of our armed forces--and
their families--needs to be firm, fixed, enduring, and non-negotiable.
The Halliburton Factor:
The High Price of Privatized War
Just as many in the Bush administration
underestimated the challenges posed by the postwar occupation
and stabilization of Iraq, they overestimated the ability of
private companies like Halliburton to bear a lion's share of
the burden in the rebuilding process. In the January/February
issue of The Atlantic, James Fallows points out the degree to
which the Pentagon cast aside all of the detailed pre-war planning
that had been done not only by the State Department, but also
by the Agency for International Development, the CIA, and the
Army War College. As the magazine's own summary puts it, "The
U.S. occupation of Iraq is a debacle not because the government
did no planning but because a vast amount of expert planning
was willfully ignored by the people in charge." 4
A related point that Fallows doesn't
mention is that there were two sets of plans that the Pentagon
had well underway before the start of the war: 1) to drop its
hand-picked Iraqi exiles into the country, and the Iraqi ministries,
as soon as possible; and 2) to hand over as much of the rebuilding
process--and the sustainment and support of U.S. troops--to private
firms like Halliburton, Bechtel, Dyncorps, and SAIC, as quickly
as possible. 5 On one level, "exiles plus-Halliburton"
was the Pentagon's plan for post-war Iraq. This raises problems
in terms of cost and accountability, but it also raises problems
in terms of our larger objectives in Iraq, such as promoting
security and democratization.
What do we know so far about Halliburton's
work for the Pentagon? We know that it has been secretive and
that it has been extensive. The company was already doing significant
work in the region under the Logistics Civil Augmentation Program
(LOGCAP) contract, a ten-year arrangement in force since 2001
under which the company is in essence the on-call logistics and
supply arm for the United States Army. Under LOGCAP and other
non-Iraq-related contracts, Halliburton's Kellogg, Brown and
Root division (KBR) has done everything from throw up "temporary"
military facilities in Afghanistan, Uzbekistan, and Iraq to build
prison facilities for terror suspects in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
So, with or without Iraqi rebuilding
money, Halliburton would be a significant Pentagon contractor.
The company has been in this line of work for some time, going
back to when then-Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney first asked
the firm to study whether a private firm might be able to provide
logistics planning and support for U.S. contingency operations.
Its first big contract for military support operations was in
Somalia, followed by a multi-billion dollar payday in the Balkans,
where the company made itself essential to the conduct of U.S.
operations. 6
What really drew public attention was
not the pre-existing LOGCAP work, it was the no-bid contract
that Halliburton received to put out potential oil fires in the
wake of an intervention in Iraq, and repair Iraqi oil infrastructure.
The company was asked to estimate the scope of work prior to
the war, and then they were awarded the contract. As an Army
spokesman put it in an interview for the New York Times Magazine,
"They were the company best positioned to execute the oil
field work because of their involvement in the planning."
7 This is circular logic, to put it mildly. Who was checking
Halliburton's assessment of what work needed to be done, to make
sure they weren't tailoring the scope of work to what they could
do rather than what needed to be done? Who was going to monitor
Halliburton, which was already providing a wide array of services
for the U.S. military worldwide? And if there were problems,
who was going to discipline Halliburton, a company that U.S.
forces were already depending on for meals, clean laundry, vehicle
maintenance, base building and repair, and a host of other essential
functions?
One of the arguments made for rushing
to give the contract to Halliburton was simple expediency. The
public was told by the Pentagon that we needed to be ready to
hit the ground running, particularly if Iraq's oil fields were
up in flames as had happened with the Kuwaiti fields in the first
Gulf War. But it turns out that there were firms that were never
allowed to bid far more capable than Halliburton of putting out
oil well fires. As the late, great Mark Fineman of the Los Angeles
Times pointed out in a piece filed with his colleague Dana Calvo
in April of 2003, Boots and Coots International Well Control
Inc., the Halliburton affiliate that would have been utilized
to put out oil well fires, was actually in financial trouble
at the time of the Iraqi contract and had limited "surge
capacity" to deal with a major outbreak of oil-well fires
in the Persian Gulf. Luckily, the oil-well fires were limited,
but even to deal with a small amount, Halliburton had to bring
in a second firm, Wild Well Control, Inc. Bill Mahler of Wild
Well told Fineman and Calvo "We would have liked to participate
in the pre-planning. It was frustrating we weren't included."
8 So, the rush to hire Halliburton didn't serve the need to get
the best oil-fire-fighting firm in place, and could well have
proved a major problem had there been more oil fires to deal
with. Secrecy didn't serve the needs of expediency, but it did
serve to exclude other qualified firms from bidding on the work.
A similar story emerges in the case of
the gasoline overcharges out of Kuwait. It appears that Halliburton
overcharged by about $1 a gallon on 57 million gallons brought
in from Kuwait, using an intermediary firm called Altanmia. When
pressed, Halliburton claimed that it was directed to use the
firm, or alternately that the firm was the most expedient firm
to truck the gasoline in from Kuwait. But when Rep. Waxman's
office asked a few questions, it emerged that Halliburton had
spent only one day looking for companies to assist in this work,
that Altanmia had no track record in fuel supply, and that there
may have been nepotism involved, in the form of a relative of
a member of the Kuwaiti ruling family associated with the firm.
Yet both Halliburton and the Army Corps of Engineers had argued
that the company had done its best under difficult circumstances
to get fuel into Iraq in the most expeditious way possible. Other
Pentagon officials seem to disagree, since there is now an investigation
underway to see if there was criminal wrongdoing involved in
the fuel overcharges. 9
Then of course there is the "meals
not served" scandal, in which Halliburton was billing the
Pentagon for 42,042 meals a day at Camp Arifjan in Kuwait while
only 14,053 were actually served. That's not a small undercount,
a case of being a little off in playing "guess who's coming
to dinner?" as one Halliburton PR person put it. That means
day in, and day out, billing U.S. taxpayers for three times as
many meals as were actually served. And according to press accounts,
the quality of the meals was so unappealing that many U.S. soldiers
in Kuwait skip out of the mess hall and go out and buy food from
vendors on the street. So far, $27 million in overcharges have
been detected in just five facilities, with roughly another 50
to be checked. 10 This sounds like a case of a company that was
not just "stressed out." This sounds like a company
that was taking advantage of the fog of war and occupation to
take U.S. taxpayers for a ride.
Finally, we have the case of at least
$6.3 million in kickbacks on yet another Halliburton contract
in Iraq. If there are kickbacks, that means there has to be enough
"padding" in the contract to allow for the kickback,
plus a profit for all concerned. And if there's a kickback on
one contract, plus an overcharge on another, plus a systematic
overbilling on a third, one must ask when these should stop being
treated as isolated instances and acknowledged as a systematic
problem of waste, fraud, abuse, and possible criminality in Halliburton's
operations in Iraq. Can these companies rip off the taxpayers
first, and then just pay back the overcharge from future contracts,
as has been the case so far, or will there be a demand for systematic
accountability and monitoring to make sure that the examples
so far are not the tip of a very large iceberg?
Toward Greater Accountability:
A Question of Balance
A number of members of Congress and representatives
of good government groups have called for Halliburton to be debarred
from government contracts altogether, or from future contracts
for the rebuilding of Iraq, based on the overcharges, kickbacks,
and overbilling practices that have emerged in its work in the
Iraqi theater to date. This may well be warranted, but it is
as important to think about how we would go about doing this
as whether to do it. As David Isenberg of the British American
Security Information Council put it recently, for our armed forces
as they are currently structured, private military companies
like Halliburton are like the American Express card--they can't
leave home without them. So before punishing a company like Halliburton,
one must consider how to accomplish the support and logistics
tasks that Halliburton is currently shouldering on behalf of
the armed forces.
The U.S. has gone too far down the road
of privatization when it comes to military support services.
There are certain levels of discipline, risk, and discretion
that one can expect from a person who has agreed to wear the
uniform of their country that one cannot necessarily expect from
a person or entity who is performing a similar task for a fee.
Lieutenant General Charles S. Mahan, Jr. has asserted that there
were points during the current Iraq war when the refusal of contract
employees to go into harm's way deprived U.S. troops of fresh
food, showers, toilets, and other basic services for months at
a time. 11
Unlike for U.S. military personnel, no
one is keeping figures on the numbers of civilian contract employees
killed and wounded in Iraq, but it is believed to be substantial,
and some press accounts have suggested that the security costs
tacked onto contracts by private companies doing rebuilding and
troop support work in Iraq are anywhere from 6% to 25%. The U.S.
cannot even provide the number of contract employees present
in Iraq at any given point. Brookings Institution expert Peter
Singer says flatly "No one knows the figures. The accounting
and accountability is Enron-like." 12 The early departure
of 60 Korean engineers from Iraq in early December after two
of their colleagues were killed in an ambush was only the most
dramatic case of how the security issue may be affecting foreign
subcontractors working for U.S. firms. 13
It is unclear what one can expect from
contract employees because in situations like Iraq they are increasingly
becoming explicit targets of terror-bombers, resisters, and "dead-enders."
They are viewed as a potential weak link in the support system
for our forces in the field that can be exploited to undermine
morale, deprive them of vital supplies, and so forth. A company
like Halliburton might well argue in response to this that they
are better equipped than most firms to operate in dangerous environments,
and that therefore they are a better choice than a firm that
might otherwise seem like a logical choice based on more traditional
business skills alone.
But it is on the efficiency front that
the case for privatization, Halliburton-style, is perhaps the
weakest of all. The advantage of privatization is supposed to
be that it shakes up complacent government bureaucracies by introducing
an element of competition. Other advantages include cutting overhead
by not having to invest in full-time, long-term employees to
do short-term tasks, and hiring individuals with specialized
skills (such as integrating certain kinds of technologies) for
as long as needed and no longer. The problem with the Halliburton
case is that once you have handed over a huge swath of your operation
to them for a 10-year period, mostly in the form of open-ended,
cost-plus contracts, there is no more competition. If you become
dependent upon a company like Halliburton for essential functions,
while eliminating the people you would need to carry out those
functions, then you are setting yourself up for the death of
a thousand cuts. Or, in this case, a thousand cost over-runs.
And that's particularly true if you don't have a good system
for monitoring their activities on a regular basis.
So, what should happen? Independent investigations
of Halliburton need to continue, but the punishments may have
to proceed in parallel with a sort of "policy audit."
This process would be helped substantially if the doors were
opened to genuine competitive bidding, not only among big U.S.
companies, but also between private companies and units of the
U.S. government that may be able to do the job better. The U.S.
should also do a better job of involving indigenous Iraqi entrepreneurs.
And the absurd limits on who can bid on Iraqi rebuilding work
should be lifted. If companies are only brought in at the subcontracting
level, there isn't competition on price at the prime contractor
level, which is where taxpayers' money can be saved.
Over time, the functions of private companies,
and which ones we want the military itself to handle, should
be reexamined--particularly with respect to logistics and support
functions that involve being in the midst of combat and occupation
operations. But for the moment, part of holding Halliburton and
other private companies accountable may involve scaling their
responsibilities down to size, so they are not "too big
to punish," without also punishing our men and women in
uniform. That doesn't mean they shouldn't be held accountable,
it just means a short- and long-term strategy is needed. The
privatization of military support functions has evolved over
a decade or more. Restoring the proper balance between government
and corporate roles in this area could take at least that long.
William D. Hartung runs the Arms Trade Resource Center and is an
advisory committee member of Foreign
Policy in Focus. He is the author of How
Much Are You Making in the War, Daddy?.
This article is adapted from testimony
presented before the Senate Democratic Policy Committee on February
13, 2004.
Endnotes
1.William D. Nordhaus, "The Economic
Consequences of a War With Iraq," in War With Iraq: Costs,
Consequences, and Alternatives (Cambridge, MA: American Academy
of Arts and Sciences, 2002), pp. 78-79.
2.From Robert Hormats, "America
Must Find the Money to Afford a War," Financial Times,
January 28, 2003. For an extended version of the arguments in
this section, see William D. Hartung, The Hidden Costs of
War, Fourth Freedom Forum, February 2003, available at www.fourthfreedom.org.
3.For updated statistics on this point,
consult the web site of the National Gulf War Resource Center
at www.ngwrc.org. See also Richard Leiby, "The Fallout of
War; Iraqi Ammo Debris Fell on Jim Stutts in '91. In Many
Ways, He's Being Pelted Still," Washington Post, December
30, 2002.
4.James Fallows, "Blind Into Baghdad,"
The Atlantic, January-February 2004, pp. 52-74.
5.On these points, see Ceara Donnelley
and William D. Hartung, New Numbers: The Price of Freedom in
Iraq and Power in Washington, Arms Trade Resource Center World
Policy Institute, August 2003; and the Center for Public Integrity,
Windfalls of War, October 2003, which is the most comprehensive
study to date of contracts let for work in Afghanistan and
Iraq.
6.The best brief history of Halliburton's
rise in this area is in P.W. Singer, Corporate Warriors: The
Rise of the Privatized Military Industry (Cornell University
Press: Ithaca and London, 2003), pp. 136-148.
7.Dan Baum, "Nation Builders for
Hire," New York Times Magazine, June 22, 2003 . For a
fuller treatment of the history of self-serving deals surrounding
Halliburton and its former CEO, Vice President Dick Cheney,
see Chapter 2, "Dick Cheney and the Power of the Self-Licking
Ice Cream Cone," in William D. Hartung, How Much Are
You Making on the War, Daddy?--A Quick and Dirty Guide to War
Profiteering in the Bush Administration (Nation Books/Avalon
Group, 2004), pp. 23-43.
8.Mark Fineman and Dana Calvo, "Dealing
with Fire; Months Before the First Bomb Fell, A Firm Tied
to Halliburton Quietly Locked In a Pact With The U.S. to Fight
Oil Well Fires. Now That Contract Is Drawing Heat," Los
Angeles Times, April 6, 2003.
9.David Ivanovich, "Politician Says
Deal Cronyism: Links Halliburton, Kuwaiti Royal Family,"
Houston Chronicle, January 16, 2004.
10."Deals on Meals," St. Louis
Post-Dispatch, February 9, 2004.
11.Anthony Bianco and Stepanie Anderson
Forest, with Stan Crock in Washington and Thomas F. Armistead
in Baghdad, "Outsourcing War," Business Week, September
15, 2003.
12.Marego Athens, "To Make a Living,
A Driver Risked It All," Baltimore Sun, February 8, 2004.
13.Ariana Eunjung Chu, "After Attack,
S. Korean Engineers Quit Iraq," Washington Post, December
8, 2003.
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