March 22, 2007 Issue

On the fourth anniversary of the war in Iraq we finally have a winner. It is Vice President Cheney’s former company, Halliburton. The company who was cited for charging our government for food that was never delivered to our troops has seen its stock price go from $20.50 on March 19, 2003 to an adjusted price of $64.12 on March 16, 2007. When your food cost is zero, profits will follow. And they just announced the company is moving to Dubai get closer to the source of their profits, and also, to avoid having to pay taxes in the United States. Well God Bless America.

The United States is now spending $20 billion (that’s $20,000,000,000 which you seldom see as figures) a month in Iraq. This summer after our new “surge” is complete we will have 150,000 troops there, 10,000 more than in the past four years. Two million Iraqis now live outside of Iraq, with 50,000 leaving monthly. Twelve thousand doctors have fled Iraq in the last four years, 2,000 have been killed and another 250 kidnapped. Iraq’s economy has a 50 percent inflation rate. The average home has electricity for a little over six hours a day. Only 32 percent of Iraqis have drinkable water. Unemployment is near 40 percent. If these figures applied to New York or Boston or any American city, can you imagine the chaos that would ensue?

That, of course, is one of the reasons we haven’t brought our troops home. The resulting chaos would be devastating. The resulting chaos? Iraq is beyond chaos now. Our troops leaving Iraq won’t make it any worse.

Another winner in the war is the security firm called Blackwater. Based in North Carolina, Blackwater is one of the little known companies that our country has hired to carry out this debacle. There are more than 100,000 contractors operating in Iraq. A typical operative for Blackwater makes $36,000 for a 60-day tour. That’s more than our soldiers make in a year. Blackwater was paid $21 million to provide protection for Paul Bremer — the ambassador and architect of this nightmare — during his 11 months in Iraq.

These contractors don’t operate like our soldiers. They don’t follow the chain of command our soldiers do. They are like loose cannons and they get paid handsomely for their time.

Franklin Roosevelt proclaimed there would be no war-profiteers in World War II. That is not the case anymore. Roosevelt knew that it took a country to fight and win a war. President Bush doesn’t understand that. The people of the United States have made no sacrifices in this Iraq effort. They haven’t been asked to. They have been asked to go on vacation, go shopping, spend money, support the economy and act like everything is normal. Everything is kind of normal, except for those pesky credit card debts, expensive gasoline, and interest only mortgages. We have an army fighting this war, not a country.

And things haven’t been going well for our army. Is it because of our leadership in Washington or because of our military leaders? Is it the result of faulty training? Have our soldiers not been properly instructed on how to carry out urban warfare? The battleground and geography of this war is more suited to the officers of the New York Police Department than it is to our soldiers.

Collateral damage is a popular euphemism in military conflicts. You don’t have to be a mathematician to understand that the collateral damage in Iraq has been phenomenal. For every innocent Iraqi killed, for every home our soldiers have invaded, for Abu Ghraib, and Gitmo, and every wedding party bombed we have produced a geometric hatred for our country.

There have been more than 100,000 innocent people killed in the last four years. But there have also been millions of mothers and fathers, sons and daughters, uncles, aunts, and friends of those innocent people who have been militarized to hate our country and all we stand for.

The people of this country have spoken. We don’t like this war anymore. Many of us didn’t like it to begin with. The invasion of Iraq in response to 9-11 made as much sense as if we had attacked Mexico after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. President Bush has not listened. As an appeasement to his critics he assembled the Iraq Study Group, headed by James Baker, his father’s Karl Rove-type guru. This diverse group of American leaders produced a detailed assessment of what had gone wrong in Iraq and what was necessary to fix it. President Bush ignored every suggestion the Iraq Study Group presented him with.

This administration has its hands full dealing with almost weekly disasters in the United States. Insisting that our leaving Iraq would result in chaos is like something out of Alice in Wonderland. If I were President Bush I wouldn’t read the newspapers either.

But it is nice to know that Halliburton, Blackwater, and numerous other military contractors are making obscene profits on the backs of our soldiers and on the misery of the Iraqi people. As Republicans are wont to say: “The business of America is business.”

Big business..

More from Charles Morgan