Global View: Blood and Gravy

[salib]

It's easy to forget sometimes -- amid all the lofty talk of geopolitics, of apocalyptic clashes between good and evil, of terror, liberty, security and God -- that the war on Iraq is "largely a matter of loot," as Kasper Gutman so aptly described the Crusades in that seminal treatise on human nature, "The Maltese Falcon." And nowhere is this more evident than in the festering, oozing imposthume of corruption centered around the Gutman-like figure of Vice President Dick Cheney.

Yes, it's once more unto the breach with Halliburton, the gargantuan government contractor that still pays Cheney, its former CEO, enormous annual sums in "deferred compensation" and stock options -- even while he presides over a White House war council that has steered more than $10 billion in no-bid Iraqi war contracts back to his corporate paymaster. This is rainmaking of monsoon proportions. Indeed, the company's military servicing wing announced a second-quarter profit spike of 284 percent last week -- a feast of blood and gravy that will send Cheney's stock options soaring into the stratosphere.


But although Halliburton has already entered the American lexicon as a byword for rampant cronyism, the true extent of its dense and deadly web of graft is only now emerging, most recently in a remarkable public hearing that revealed some of the corporation's standard business practices in Iraq: fraud, extortion, brutality, pilferage, theft -- even serving rotten food to U.S. soldiers in the battle zone.

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http://context.themoscowtimes.com/stories/2005/08/05/120.html