The Great Iraq Swindle

Claymore · Sep 7, 2007

I've spent most of my adult life in procurement and contracting, some of which was with federal contractors. The shit going on in Iraq just makes me want to shoot someone:

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/16076312/the_great_iraq_swindle

heybeerman · Sep 7, 2007

Wow. But I'm not surprised.

Operation Iraqi Freedom, it turns out, was never a war against Saddam **Hussein's Iraq. It was an invasion of the federal budget, and no occupying force in history has ever been this efficient. George W. Bush's war in the Mesopotamian desert was an experiment of sorts, a crude first take at his vision of a fully privatized American government.
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Footer Phooter · Sep 7, 2007

Rolling Stone said:

Ihe company has been exposed by whistle-blowers in numerous Senate hearings for everything from double-charging taxpayers for $617,000 worth of sodas to overcharging the government 600 percent for fuel shipments.
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Wasn't there a thread a while back where the fuel thing came up and several posters on here insisted that the 600% mark-ups were proper, despite the fact that there are some of us on this board who have at least some idea what we're talking about when it comes to procurement?

Dr. Wankler · Sep 7, 2007

Claymore said: ↑

I've spent most of my adult life in procurement and contracting, some of which was with federal contractors. The shit going on in Iraq just makes me want to shoot someone:

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/16076312/the_great_iraq_swindle
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Haven't read the article yet, but I just wanted to point out that your avatar is a perfect visual aid to this post.

Matt in the Hat · Sep 7, 2007

1) Paul Bremmer should be hung for treason. Seriously.
2) I had no idea people still read Rolling Stone. They are silly thinking that they are "breaking" the Go Team! as a new band.
3) Matt Taibi is still unreadable.

Malaga CF fan · Sep 7, 2007

he sent a twenty-four-year-old who had never worked in finance to manage the reopening of the Iraqi stock exchange, and appointed a recent graduate of an evangelical university for home-schooled kids who had no accounting experience to manage Iraq's $13 billion budget. James K. Haveman, who had served as Michigan's community-health director under a GOP governor, was put in charge of rehabilitating Iraq's health-care system and decided that what this war-ravaged, malnourished, sanitation-deficient country most urgently needed was . . . an anti-smoking campaign.
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This is the stuff that makes you want to throw up. If this had been Bill Clinton's administration, he would have been impeached (and removed from office - and if he had indeed done it, I would have gladly booted him from office) but in this new century of chicken shit politicians unwilling to risk their political careers to take a stand that matters, we get the weak-backed Democrats just trying to keep their incompetence under the radar long enough to sneak Hillary or Obama into the White House. A strategy that will ultimately bite them in the ass.

The great Bush lie is that 9/11 changed everything. And it did, but not in terms of our national security, but in how the purse strings of the federal government were opened to looters and political appointees to rake in insane profits and ride off in the sunset unscathed by oversight and consequences. The perfect crime.

If this is what complete privatization looks like, then count me out. In its execution, it's indistinguishable from the opposite end of the spectrum, Communism. Ultimately, the state becomes completely corrupted by the power holders in the Government and the connected stake holders in industry, accountability vanishes, and the citizens are stuck with a massive mess to clean up.

The system is broken.

heybeerman · Sep 7, 2007

Malaga CF fan said: ↑

The great Bush lie is that 9/11 changed everything. And it did, but not in terms of our national security, but in how the purse strings of the federal government were opened to looters and political appointees to rake in insane profits and ride off in the sunset unscathed by oversight and consequences. The perfect crime.
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And that what makes me listen to the Conspiracy Theories.

Kobranzilla · Sep 7, 2007

USA! USA! USA! USA!

When Custer Battles was caught delivering broken trucks to the Army, a military official says the company told him, "We were only told we had to deliver the trucks. The contract doesn't say they had to work."

Such excuses speak to a monstrous vacuum of patriotism; it would be hard to imagine contractors being so blithely disinterested in results during World War II, where every wasted dollar might mean another American boy dead from gangrene in the Ardennes. But the rampant waste of money and resources also suggests a widespread contempt for the ostensible "purpose" of our presence in Iraq. Asked to cast a vote for the war effort, contractors responded by swiping everything they could get their hands on -- and the administration's acquiescence in their thievery suggests that it, too, saw making a buck as the true mission of the war.
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as long as everyone has a $1 yellow ribbon on their SUV, all will be well

Dr. Wankler · Sep 7, 2007

Kobranzilla said: ↑

USA! USA! USA! USA!

as long as everyone has a $1 yellow ribbon on their SUV, all will be well
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You're forgetting the real issue: we've prevented homos from ruining the sanctity of my marriage. Who cares about this other stuff?

spejic · Sep 7, 2007

It can only be a swindle if Bush knew that there were no WMD's in the first place.

Oh, wait.

http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/sidney_blumenthal/2007/09/turning_truth_into_lies.html

ratdog · Sep 7, 2007

Hooray for capitalism!

I guess this gives the GOP base an answer to "If Bush ran it, crime wouldn't pay.".

MasterShake29 · Sep 7, 2007

Malaga CF fan said: ↑

If this is what complete privatization looks like, then count me out. In its execution, it's indistinguishable from the opposite end of the spectrum, Communism. Ultimately, the state becomes completely corrupted by the power holders in the Government and the connected stake holders in industry, accountability vanishes, and the citizens are stuck with a massive mess to clean up.

The system is broken.
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This is not privatization, this is just government as usual. What's new about politicians rewarding their friends?

Matt in the Hat · Sep 7, 2007

ratdog said: ↑

Hooray for capitalism!

I guess this gives the GOP base an answer to "If Bush ran it, crime wouldn't pay.".
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This is not capitalism. This is corporatism.

purojogo · Sep 8, 2007

Matt in the Hat said: ↑

This is not capitalism. This is corporatism.
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Hooray for the "first CEO administration" then?

what a disgusting and unpatriotic way of doing business by these contractors in the article....and what a bunch of corrupt SOBs are those in the Bush administration who would not even dare prosecute them despite all evidence...and which was shown not just in the article, but also on a thread that was posted not that long ago....

DoctorJones24 · Sep 8, 2007

Naomi Klein's 2005 Harper's essay is mandatory reading and worth looking at alongside the RS piece:

I was also reminded of the most common explanation for what has gone wrong in Iraq, a complaint echoed by everyone from John Kerry to Pat Buchanan: Iraq is mired in blood and deprivation because George W. Bush didn't have “a postwar plan.” The only problem with this theory is that it isn't true. The Bush Administration did have a plan for what it would do after the war; put simply, it was to lay out as much honey as possible, then sit back and wait for the flies.

* * *

The honey theory of Iraqi reconstruction stems from the most cherished belief of the war's ideological architects: that greed is good. Not good just for them and their friends but good for humanity, and certainly good for Iraqis. Greed creates profit, which creates growth, which creates jobs and products and services and everything else anyone could possibly need or want. The role of good government, then, is to create the optimal conditions for corporations to pursue their bottomless greed, so that they in turn can meet the needs of the society. The problem is that governments, even neoconservative governments, rarely get the chance to prove their sacred theory right: despite their enormous ideological advances, even George Bush's Republicans are, in their own minds, perennially sabotaged by meddling Democrats, intractable unions, and alarmist environmentalists.

Iraq was going to change all that. In one place on Earth, the theory would finally be put into practice in its most perfect and uncompromised form. A country of 25 million would not be rebuilt as it was before the war; it would be erased, disappeared. In its place would spring forth a gleaming showroom for laissez-faire economics, a utopia such as the world had never seen. Every policy that liberates multinational corporations to pursue their quest for profit would be put into place: a shrunken state, a flexible workforce, open borders, minimal taxes, no tariffs, no ownership restrictions. The people of Iraq would, of course, have to endure some short-term pain: assets, previously owned by the state, would have to be given up to create new opportunities for growth and investment. Jobs would have to be lost and, as foreign products flooded across the border, local businesses and family farms would, unfortunately, be unable to compete. But to the authors of this plan, these would be small prices to pay for the economic boom that would surely explode once the proper conditions were in place, a boom so powerful the country would practically rebuild itself.
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http://www.harpers.org/archive/2004/09/0080197

Revolt · Sep 11, 2007

Bottom line: This is the republican legacy. I can't wait for the dems to hammer them on this.

Crap. I forgot; the dems have spina bifida - they can't pick up hammers.