War is a tragedy for some and a boon for others. As American soldiers continue to die in Iraq, and the length of the war and its costs escalate, Halliburton, the company headed by Vice-President Dick Cheney before the Bush Administration took office, announced that it had converted a half billion dollar quarterly loss of a year ago into a quarterly profit of $26 million for the same period in 2003. This profit comes largely from hundreds of millions of dollars in Iraqi rebuilding and oil contracts awarded by the Bush Administration.
But why should war be good for those who have been good to the Republican party? “The Bush Administration,” the Baltimore Sun recently reported, “continues to use American corporations to perform work that United Nations agencies and nonprofit aid groups can do more cheaply.” “Both for ideological reasons,” Paul Krugman observed in the New York Times, “and, one suspects, because of the patronage involved, the people now running the country seem determined to have public services provided by private corporations, no matter what the circumstances.”
Representatives Henry Waxman, John Dingell and Maxine Waters are to be commended for monitoring the war profiteers and the conflicts of interest so pervavsive in this Administration. (In March, Waters offered an amendment that would have prohibited the Administration from awarding contracts to companies which had employed senior administration officials. In April, Waxman and Dingell sent letters to the General Accounting Office demanding an investigation into how the Pentagon was handling the bidding process for lucrative contracts for rebuilding Iraq.)
But where’s the broader outrage? Isn’t the issue of war profiteering a strong one for Democratic Presidential candidates? Or even for common-sense Republicans who put their country before profit? They could lead their party against a President and Vice-President rolling in corporate cash–some of it from companies that have directly profited from war. Where is the leader with the courage to say, as Franklin Roosevelt did during World War II, ‘”I don’t want to see a single war millionaire created in the United States as a result of this world disaster'”? Even Harry Truman, considered a model centrist by DLC types, referred to profiteering during World War II as “treason.”
With all due credit to the World Policy Institute‘s new report ,”New Numbers: The Price of Freedom in Iraq and Power in Washington,” let’s call for:
*Transparency and Accountabilty: Let’s demand a Senate Investigation on war profiteering comparable to the one that Truman conducted at the end of World War Two.
*Curbs on Profiteering: All contracts for the rebuilding of Iraq should be on a limited profit basis, not the open-ended deals that Halliburton and other US contractors have received thus far.
*Legislation which would require all rebuilding contracts for Iraq to be subject to an open bidding process, and a temporary “Truman Committee” to oversee all Iraqi war contracts, as The Nation proposed in an editorial last May.
*Putting the Political Money Machine on Hold: To avoid even the appearance of conflict of interest, Bush and all of his challengers should pledge that they will not accept campaign contributions from companies that have profited from the war in Iraq, or the subsequent rebuilding effort.
Muscular Congressional actions like these would go a long way toward tempering some of the most corrupt practices of this ethically-challenged and political tone-deaf Administration.
