SENTIENT TIMES October/November 2002

Murder for Profit

By William Rivers Pitt

Some will tell you that the sudden, seemingly inexplicable rush to war with Iraq is nothing more or less than a ruse to get economic scandals off the front pages and out of the nightly news cycles. July was a catastrophically bad month for the Bush administration. Every time George spoke on camera, the Dow Jones would melt through the floorboards. The shady, patently illegal dealings of his old company, Harken, were a regular topic for the news talk shows. His Vice President had gone into hiding to avoid subpoenas that would compel him to spill the beans about another criminal enterprise, Halliburton, as well as the ways and means of the back-room corporate dealings which led to the Bush administration’s energy plan. Hovering over it all like the raven was Enron, and all the winding financial roads that led from Ken Lay to the Oval Office.

If it was and is all a ruse, it has worked masterfully. The coming mid-term elections, which had appeared this summer to portend a fantastic wipeout at the polls for the Republican Party because of all the economic uncertainty, now will likely be all about Iraq and patriotism. This change in the conversation has been aided and abetted by the media, which would vastly prefer to report on war while broadcasting grainy green images of explosions far away. The economic stuff was boring and depressing, and people were switching it all off because it was too much to bear. This change was also aided by Congressional Democrats who forgot all too easily about Enron and Harken, thus allowing Bush and his people to frame the conversation in much more comfortable terms. It is all a smokescreen, and there will be no war.

Others will tell you that, in fact, there is no ruse. The Bush administration means to make war on Iraq, and that right soon. The GOP platform for the 2000 election set its cap for “regime change” before Bush was finished with the primaries. Bush’s challenge to the United Nations, that they must “show some backbone” in this push or be made irrelevant, demonstrates that America intends to attack Iraq with or without an international mandate. American forces have been augmented in the region, warships have been put to sea and navigated towards the Persian Gulf, Air Force expeditionary wings have been ordered to make ready for combat, orders for many new “smart bombs” have been placed to weapons contractors, medical reservists have been called to active duty, and divisions of Marines have had their training schedules disrupted to prepare them for deployment. One does not do all these things lightly and to no real purpose.

All the while, administration officials like Dick Cheney have frothed into every microphone available, beating the war drum with martial vigor. The Bush administration has invested an incredible amount of political capital into this coming war. The neo-conservative base Bush enjoys has been whipped into a frenzy. If his administration fails to attack Saddam Hussein, there will be a wild revolt along his flank that will make the outrage vented over his signing of the campaign finance reform bill sound like the squeaking of a mouse by comparison.

It has to be one or the other, right? Either the whole push towards war in Iraq is a Karl Rovian ploy to change the conversation and save the GOP from annihilation at the polls in November, or it is an actual charge into battle for reasons codified in the Republican Party platform before George W. Bush even became the nominee.

The simple, monstrous truth of the matter is that both of these scenarios are in play simultaneously, linked by political opportunism and the desires of empire.

Bush will go to war in Iraq to satisfy the dreams of the neo-conservative hawks in his administration—Perle, Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld and Cheney to name a few— who wish more than anything to redraw the map of the Middle East and institute “regime changes” in Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Iran. Iraq is merely a starting point, the “tactical pivot” described in a summer briefing to Perle’s Defense Policy Board by Rand corporation think-tankers, which will open the rest of the region to attack. Make no mistake: These are the men running American foreign policy today, as well as the War on Terror, and they want “total war” in that region. They have admitted that they have no idea what will come of it—thousands of dead American troops, tens or hundreds of thousands of dead civilians, massive retaliatory terrorism on our shores—but they are more than willing to pay that price to gain a permanent hold on that strategically vital region.

Bush will also go to war to satisfy the desires of men like Andrew Card, the White House chief of staff who looks at politics and policy through the eyes of a marketing strategist. Until recently, the product Card had to sell to the American people was smeared with scandal and economic ruin. Bush and his corporate friends have treated the Treasury, and the stock-rooted retirement dreams of millions of Americans, the way a hammer-wielding thief treats a jewelry store display case during a smash-and grab robbery. This was a recipe for disaster come November. War on Iraq has stripped that old, damaged product from the shelves, replacing it with a martial President surging forth against a dangerous foe. The weeks of hemming and hawing over whether or not to go it alone, salted with vastly overstated descriptions of the threat posed by Iraq, and culminating with Bush’s appearance before the UN, has changed the national debate completely. Card’s new product is priced to move.

We must face a wretched truth. George W. Bush has allowed, and will continue to allow, a course for war to be charted in order to save his party at the polls in November. At the same time, he has given free rein to the neo-con hawks in his administration to begin a process of total war in the Middle East in order to secure petroleum profits for the foreseeable future. Untold hundreds or thousands of Americans will die in this process, as will tens of thousands of innocent civilians. One can only guess the number of American civilians who will die in their own country at the hands of the terrorists who will doubtlessly attack America again in response to this program.
This is murder for profit, a capitol crime meriting the gas chamber for any American convicted of it in a court of law. Period.

William Rivers Pitt is writer and teacher from Boston, Massachusetts and a regular contributor to www.t r u t h o u t.org where this article was first published last Sep-tember. William’s new book (written with Scott Ritter), War on Iraq: What Team Bush Doesn’t Want You to Know, published by Context Books, is available by special order from your local book store or online from Amazon.com.

Fortunes of War Await Bush’s Circle

The last time the United States went to war against Iraq, Dick Cheney did very nicely from it. Having served as Defense Secretary [during the Gulf War] he then managed to reap benefits of a very different kind once the war was over and he left government to become chief executive of Halliburton, the Texas-based oil services company.

When the UN relaxed its sanctions in 1998 and permitted Iraq to buy spare parts for its oil fields, it was Halliburton, under Mr. Cheney’s leadership, that cleaned up on the contract to repair war damage and get Saddam Hussein’s oil pipes flowing at full capacity again. Two Halliburton subsidiaries did business worth almost $24 million with the man whom these days Mr. Cheney calls a “murderous dictator” and “the world’s worst leader.”

Since taking over as George Bush’s vice-president, Mr. Cheney has severed all formal ties with his former employer, notably when he cashed in $36 million in stock options and other benefits at the height of the market in August 2000. But Halliburton—currently struggling with a corporate accounting scandal that may or may not implicate Mr Cheney —could profit all over again if the much-threatened new war against Iraq comes to pass.

We can certainly expect more air strikes against the oil fields, possibly combined with a ground invasion. Then, when it is all over, someone is going to have to mop up the damage once again. Halliburton, with its previous experience and unparalleled political connections (not limited to Mr. Cheney), would be in pole position for the job.

Donald Rumsfeld, the current Defense Secretary, has repeatedly raised the specter of Iraq’s arsenal of weapons of mass destruction. But in 1983, when Mr. Rumsfeld was President Reagan’s special envoy to Iraq, he turned a blind eye to Iraqi use of nerve and mustard gas in its war with Iran, concentrating instead on forging a personal relationship with the Iraqi leader, then considered a valuable US ally.

Mr. Rumsfeld was actually in Baghdad on the day the United Nations first reported Iraqi use of chemical weapons, but chose to remain silent, as did the rest of the US establishment. Five years later, he cited his ability to make friends with Saddam Hussein as one of his qualifications for a possible run at the presidency.

There are also uncomfortably cozy ties between the government and the defense industry. Mr. Rumsfeld’s oldest friend, Frank Carlucci, a former defense secretary himself, now heads the Carlyle Group, an investment consortium which has a big interest in the contracting firm United Defense. Carlyle’s board includes George Bush Sr. and James Baker, the former secretary of state. One program alone—the Crusader artillery system—has earned Carlyle more than $2 billion in advance government contracts.
- Andrew Gumbel,
the Independent (UK)

ABC News Nightline opened its June 9, 1992 broadcast with these words: “It is becoming increasingly clear,” said a grave Ted Koppel, “that George Bush, operating largely behind the scenes throughout the 1980s, initiated and supported much of the financing, intelligence, and military help that built Saddam’s Iraq into the aggressive power that the United States ultimately had to destroy.”

When Saddam went to war against Iran, becoming the world’s chief practitioner of chemical warfare, U.S. realpolitikers dubbed him the lesser of two evils, and the one less likely to disrupt the oil flow. The essence is that secret efforts to support him became the order of the day, both during his long war with Iran and afterward. Much of what Saddam received from the West was not arms per se, but so-called dual-use technology—ultra sophisticated computers, armored ambulances, helicopters, chemicals, and the like, with potential civilian uses as well as military applications. We’ve learned by now that a vast network of companies, based in the U.S. and abroad, eagerly fed the Iraqi war machine right up until August 1990, when Saddam invaded Kuwait.
- Russ W. Baker,
Columbia Journalism Review
March/April 1993

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