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The Bush administration’s motivation to continue allowing the daily carnage in Iraq is based to some (and probably large extend) on war profiteering schemes involving current and former members of the administration and those business interests linked or related to them. It is obvious that the war is lost, but the profiteers will attempt to string it out as long as possible to rake in further billions of dollars.

An Associated Press-Ipsos poll showed that 70% of Americans opposed sending more troops, but Bush went right ahead and did it anyways. And then to make matters worse, this month he announces the plan to extend the 12-month tours to 15-months to allow his 30,000-troop buildup in Baghdad to stay for another year.

A January 2007 study by Columbia University economist Joseph Stiglitz, who won a Nobel Prize in economics in 2001, and Harvard lecturer Linda Bilmes, estimated that the total costs of the Iraq war could be more than $2 trillion when the long-term medical costs for the soldiers injured so far are factored in. And where does most of the money go to? The only people who are benefiting from Bush’s war on terror are members of the Military Industrial Complex.

• Since 9/11, the pay for the CEOs of the top 34 defense contractors in the US has doubled. George David, CEO of United Technologies is the top earner, making more than $200 million since 9/11, despite investigations into the poor quality of the firm’s Black Hawk helicopters. Halliburton CEO David Lesar made $26.6 million in 2005, and nearly $50 million since 9/11, an amount that even beats the $24 million that Dick Cheney received in exchange for the guarantee that Halliburton would be the number one military contractor during the Bush administration.
• Cheney himself is profits from the war. He received a deferred salary from Halliburton of $205,298 in 2001, $262,392 in 2002, $278,437 in 2003, and $294,852 in 2004. In 2005 he continued to hold over 300,000 Halliburton stock options; their value had risen 3,281% over the previous year, from $241,498 to more than $8 million. Cheney’s Halliburton received more than $2 billion in Iraq reconstruction contracts.



• Undersecretary of Defense Doug Feith, largely credited for fabricating the tales that got the US into the war to begin with, was a partner with Marc Zell, in the Feith & Zell, DC law firm before joining the administration. After he left for the White House, Zell renamed the firm, Zell, Goldberg & Co, and teamed up with Salem Chalabi, best buddy Ahmed Chalabi’s nephew, to solicit contracts for clients in Iraq. This scam operated under the name, “Iraqi International Law Group” (IILG). Marc Zell was the firm’s “marketing consultant” and had contacted law firms in Washington and New York to ask if they had clients interested in doing business in Iraq. Feith helped set up the Coalition Provisional Authority in May 2003, with its leader Paul Bremer, and Feith’s office and the CPA were in charge of awarding reconstruction contracts with Iraqi money. Salem was a legal adviser to Iraq’s governing council, of which his Uncle was a member, and Bremer even tried to appoint him to lead the tribunal that would try Saddam.
• Uncle Chabali footprints in the profiteering racket can be traced back to September 2003, when the CPA awarded an $80 million contract to Nour USA, a company with ties to Winston Partners; Winston Partners is headed by none other than Marvin Bush, the brother to the president. Nour USA was founded in May 2003 by, Abul Huda Farouki, whose financial ties to Ahmed Chalabi date back to 1989, when Chalabi was CEO of the Petra Bank, and helped Farouqi finance projects around the world. Nour’s website at the time described the firm as an “international investment and development company” with more than 100 employees based in Iraq, and listed expertise in telecommunications, agribusiness, internet development, recruitment, construction materials, oil and power services, pharmaceuticals and fashion apparel. In other words: lots of opportunities to make money.
• In January 2004, Nour picked up another contract to equip the Iraqi armed forces and police worth $327 million. However, shortly thereafter, Nour came under fire when a shady deal surfaced involving the first $80 million contract and Ahmed Chalabi. He had received $2 million for helping to arrange the contract, but as it turned out, the contract was actually awarded to Erinys International, a firm set up in Iraq immediately after the invasion. Within days of receiving the contract, Erinys became a joint venture operation with Nour.



• Next, the $327 million contract was in jeopardy after it was revealed that Nour had no experience providing military equipment and Nour claimed that it planned to subcontract its weapons procurement to Ostrowski Arms. However, the army soon learned that Ostowski had no license to export weapons. The contract was finally axed in March 2004, after six of the 17 firms that bid on it complained that Nour’s winning bid was impossibly low.
• Connected to this insider deal also was the Cohen Group. Former Republican Congressman and Secretary of Defense under Clinton, William Cohen, sits at the helm of the Cohen Group. When he left office in January 2001, Cohen was saddled with debt. However, within a matter of weeks Cohen and his wife were residing in a $3.5 million mansion. It seems Cohen had wanted this house but was still in office and had no way to finance the purchase, so Frank Zarb, then chairman of the Nasdaq Stock Market, sold the house to Michael Ansari, chairman and CEO of defense contractor MIC Industries, in October 2000, and the Cohen took up residence in January or February of 2001. From there, Cohen went on to join the board and audit committee of the Nasdaq Stock Market, and 11 days after he left office, MIC announced Cohen’s appointment as chairman of its board of advisers in a press release.
• In no time at all the Cohen Group was raking in mega-bucks. In applying for one contract, that earned the Group $490,000 over seven months, the firm bragged that it had helped Lockheed win a $3.6 billion contract for the sale of F-16 fighter jets to Poland, financed by the US government. The Group’s proposal said its efforts for the Lockheed deal included “advocacy with key decision-makers in the White House, Office of the Vice President, National Security Council, Department of Defense and the State Department during an 18-month campaign,” according to the Post.
• Bush’s former campaign manager, Joe Allbaugh, who was later appointed to head FEMA, had quit his job 3 weeks before the bombs began to fall in Iraq to start the consulting firm, New Bridge Strategies, for clients seeking contracts in Iraq. The profiteering team at New Bridges was stacked with Republicans. The company’s address was the same as a lobbying firm run by Haley Barbour, a former chairman of the Republican National Committee that went under the name of Barbour Griffith & Rogers. And the greedy thugs were dreaming about “one well-stocked 7-Eleven … knocking out thirty Iraqi stores, [and] a Wal-Mart [being able to take] over the country” once the war ends.



• However since the war never did end, in 2004, Joe Allbaugh abandoned the quest for reconstruction gold mine in Iraq and started a consulting firm with the former director of Cheney’s secret energy task force, Andrew Lundquist, and their first client was Lockheed Martin. This marriage between the ex-campaign manager, Cheney’s buddy, and Lockheed apparently worked out much better than the plan to build 7-Elevens in Iraq, because Lockheed stock value has doubled since 2001, and according to the Excess Report, the firm’s CEO has made $50 million since 9/11.
• In the Lockheed scenario Allbaugh was simply able to jump on the bandwagon. Haley Barbour had already worked as a lobbyist for a Lockheed, Cheney’s wife Lynne served on the board of Lockheed before Cheney took over as VP, receiving deferred compensation to the tune of half a million dollars in stock and fees. In addition, Cheney’s son-in-law, Philip Perry, was appointed to serve as general counsel to the Department of Homeland Security, and he had been a registered lobbyist for Lockheed who had worked for a law firm representing Lockheed with the Department of Homeland Security.
• Less than a month after 9/11, in October of 2001, the Pentagon announced a $20 billion contract for Lockheed for the development of the Joint Strike Fighter, called the F-35. At the time, Edward Aldridge was Undersecretary of Defense for acquisitions, technology and logistics, which was responsible for the approval of the contract. Aldridge left his government post in 2003, and he now just happens to serve on Lockheed’s board of directors.
• In November 2002, Stephen Hadley, deputy national security advisor at the time, called Lockheed employee, Bruce Jackson, to a meeting at the White House and told him that the US was definitely going to war in Iraq but there was one small hitch, the administration could not decide what reason to use to justify it. So Jackson formed the “Committee for the Liberation of Iraq”, a pressure group pushing for regime change - that is, military action to remove Hussein - by lobbying members of congress, working with the media and throwing money around.
• Jackson closed down the Committee in June 2003 because its human rights rationale had been abandoned after Rumsfeld took control and put terrorism and WMDs on the agenda as the rationale for the war, not human rights as Jackson had favoured. However, the war sales team members that served with Jackson have done well for themselves. The president of the Committee, Randy Scheunemann, became the president of the Mercury Group, and lobbied for Lockheed and others, and then set up the firms, Scheunemann and Associates, and Orion Strategies, which, among other things, consults with companies and countries looking to do business in Iraq. In November 2003, another Committee member, Rend Al-Rahim Francke, was appointed Iraqi ambassador to the US.

Meanwhile back in Iraq goldmine, the Iraqis have nothing to show for all the torture that they have endured for the past 4 years. On average, Iraqis still get only about two hours of electricity a day, and the situation won’t be improving anytime soon because the US has not built a single major power plant. And despite the $22 billion funneled to the war profiteers for reconstruction, a US official recently said, Baghdad may not have continuous 24-hour electricity until the year 2013.

There is no reason to believe that the thievery has ended or the situation in Iraq will get better because an audit released on January 31, 2007, by Inspector General, Stuart Bowen, reported that the $300 billion war and reconstruction effort continues to be plagued with waste and corruption, and yet Bush wants another $100 billion to be funneled through Iraq to the exact same thieves and thugs.

This post is a modified version of an article by Evelyn Pringle (Information Clearing House); Evelyn Pringle is a columnist for OpEd News and an investigative journalist focused on exposing corruption in government and corporate America

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 19th, 2007 at 4:00 pm and is filed under holistic ethics, political structure, war and violence, world of money. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.