Dan Feidt's log on Minnesota, Information Operations, spinstorms and latent contradictions.
Suddenly there is news that Halliburton may have been taking kickbacks and other shady dealings in the process of feeding American troops in Iraq and Kuwait.
Halliburton may have overcharged more than $16 million for meals at a U.S. military base in Kuwait last year, according to a published report.A story in the online edition of the Wall Street Journal early Monday cited Pentagon investigators auditing the company's work as saying they were extending the audit of Halliburton subsidiary Kellogg Brown & Root food services to include more than 50 other dining facilities in Kuwait and Iraq.
In January, Halliburton acknowledged it may have over billed for contract work ranging from laundry service to oil-field reconstruction in Iraq and credited the U.S. government for $6.3 million in case an investigation confirmed the overcharges....
Cheney knows what Napoleon meant when he said that an army marches on its stomach. The state will privilege those who feed the soldiers. There isn't much oversight, or even law, outside the Pentagon inspectors (reporting to Likudnik/Pentagon comptroller Dov Zakheim, most likely).
At this point we have to ask more fundamental questions about the structure of the military-industrial complex, and how tasks are delegated in its management. Why, exactly, does control of the Kuwaiti mess halls need to pass through Halliburton's hands on the way to shady Kuwaitis? Why doesn't an Army agency contract the Kuwaitis directly? Halliburton, here, is clearly a parasitic middleman with no productive role whatsoever.
The idea that one private company should profit from supervising the planning of military bases suggests that the company's management would tend to generate a groupthink mindset in sync with military expansionists. Once you've gotten one war rolling, it's a worse temptation than heroin to play the game again. The guaranteed profit incentive has been fully swallowed up by the machinery. The machinery really, really likes it.
The question simply put, is "How much can one private corporation be trusted to do?" The same exact pattern was replicated in Iraq Two-point-Oh when Bechtel received the power to control Iraq's services. This sort of stuff should have been run from American Ministerial offices--cloned from the former Iraq's complex bureaucracy and streamlined for easy Iraqi takeover. Instead, key activities concerning the total reconstruction are slid around, and Bechtel's friends play three-card monte with our taxpayers' repair funds.
The whole system is designed to be opaque, and to defy Congressional, international, and even Iraqi monitoring. The chains of command in this monstrous conglomeration of carpet baggers and creepy ex-mil cheerleaders are intentionally tangled to help them run the racket.
The real catch is that it's hard to line up these subcontractors for very long, because it's so dangerous they can't get insurance, and they can't be guaranteed to keep their contracts under the upcoming Iraqi government. This corporate makeup effectively renders the occupation structurally hostile to Iraqi unions. (Unfortunately the Socialists point out that Iraq has an amazingly rich history of labor organization and resistance)
Privatization, where every corp gets a bite of Iraqi public assets, is an idiotic scheme too. Arab state sector economies are all huge, since their employment is puffed up by state oil revenue. That's how Arabs reward their citizens: comfortably secure state jobs. Administered from giant bureaucracies such as that which "accidentally" got trashed in Baghdad's most easily defended area.
We are dealing with very bad people who have their own designs for bureaucratic management. The Israeli settlement project, too, is a death bureaucracy. Within the rules of its own sprawling, hopelessly catastrophic legal-religious-nationalist technical process of generating points on a map (altogether, the Israeli legal process of legitimizing "illegal" settlements, alongside the long-term urbanization plans and tax incentives ensnaring innocent Israelis), Israel will plan itself into complete incoherency. (not to speak of the Palestinian experience under this "civil administration")
The key connection is that there are too many circuits already programmed into the the U.S.'s military-industrial machine which materially, legally and financially, support the Israeli occupation process and the thoroughly corrupt administration of Iraq. The right-wing think-tanks and all those weapons contractors friendly to Israel (such as Boeing Israel run by a former ambassador) will continue to suppress facing the horrible contradictions in U.S. policy towards the Arab people as a whole. One American financial backer of radical settler groups also showers money upon the American Enterprise Institute, for example. Then there's Pentagon Undersecretary Douglas Feith, who has used his legal skills to argue the legitimacy of the Israeli system, and of course his former law partner Marc Zell is a leading Israeli settler (involved in arranging corporate contracts in Iraq, praise God!). These are very bad and troublesome circuits, and people will go a long ways to avoid thinking about them.
Stepping back here I see a bureaucracy of Israeli settlements expanding under its own peculiar catalysts, a rather hastily torched public Arab bureaucracy down in Baghdad, and MilCorps in Virginia rendering the management of ever more American government functions private, and hence at least a little more dictatorial. The great Iraqi state army offices vanished in a puff of Chalabism. Bechtel inserted its own layer over the heart of Iraqi activity. Their eyes turned upon the glittering invisible prize, the great material prize of history, all the power within the Iraqi oil reserves. The problem is that for the both the corporate warriors and the local mujahideen, the lure of this power seems to be their downfall.
This is what you get when you don't pay attention to who is feeding and housing the soldiers.
Posted by HongPong at February 2, 2004 02:18 AM