IRAQ FOR SALE
Thursday 28 September @ 13:36:44 |
 A documentary look at greed and profiteering
by MAX SPARBER
 Franklin Delano Roosevelt seemed to think so, famously making this demand of America during World War II: “I don’t want to see a single war millionaire created in the United States as a result of the world disaster.” Before Harry Truman was president, he declared certain forms of war profiteering to be treason, and traveled 30,000 miles in his Dodge to investigate companies that were making money off the war. Truman ferreted out wartime fraud and mismanagement, including billions of dollars of wasted taxpayer money and, even more troubling, substandard work that could potentially put soldiers’ lives at risk. At Truman’s urging, Roosevelt raised the excess-profits tax to 90 percent and increased the corporate income tax, vastly reducing the profit-making incentive of war contractors. Truman’s work battling war profiteers made him a national hero and, eventually, president.
And it’s not as though Roosevelt and Truman spontaneously decided that profiteering was immoral. Businesses that made money during World War I publicly turned their profits over to charities, rather than be thought of as making fortunes off human misery. This was dramatized in John Steinbeck’s “East Of Eden,” in which prodigal son Cal attempts to win back the lost fortune of his devout father, who has been driven nearly broke by a failed scheme to transport frozen lettuce. Cal’s money-making venture involves buying beans at below-market prices from California growers and selling them to England, where, as the result of World War I rationing, beans are in short supply. Elia Kazan’s film version of the Steinbeck novel makes great drama out of the scene in which Cal, played by James Dean, attempts to give his father his profits, only to be rebuffed as a war profiteer. “You’ll have to give it back,” his father cries out. “I can’t profit from the misfortunes of others.”
Steinbeck wrote “East of Eden” in 1952, and the film version came
out in 1955—what a difference a half-century makes. In his new film “Iraq
for Sale,” documentarian Robert Greenwald, a filmmaker and producer
with a long resume of socially conscious films (including 2005’s “Wal-Mart:
The High Cost of Low Price” and 2004’s “Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch’s
War in Journalism”), makes the case that obscene profiteering is now business
as usual. Greenwald quotes some astounding figures in his film, ranging in the
billions of dollars for individual companies—obscene amounts that stagger
the imagination. But even the figures cited by the film are certainly outdated
now as the cost of the war continues to escalate. (At this writing, the Iraq
War has cost the country an estimated $317 billion, and will eventually tally
in at over $2 trillion, according to Columbia University economist and Nobel
Prize winner Joseph E. Stiglitz.) An increasingly large percentage of our war
budget is going to war contractors, with the administration claiming that private
companies provide a valuable specialized expertise in the day-to-day operations
of rebuilding a nation. It’s an expensive expertise as well—the
average monthly pay for an American soldier in Iraq is $4,160.75, while the
monthly salary of a contractor in Iraq can range from $5,000 to $15,500 a month,
according to jobs posted on sites like jobline.net.
So, when we hire private companies and send them to Iraq, what are we getting
for our money? Disturbingly, Greenwald makes a compelling case that these companies
are wasteful at best, grotesquely incompetent at worst, and frequently a deadly
combination of the two.
In one instance, Greenwald casts a corrosive look at Abu Ghraib prison, interviewing
interrogators, victims of torture and Janis Karpinski, the former Brigadier
General of the prison. What emerges is a portrait of a system that has been
infiltrated and infected by privatization, as the notorious Iraqi prison finds
itself overrun with non-military interrogators from CACI,
an Arlington-based contracting business that expanded its responsibilities at
Abu Ghraib from clerical work to supervising interrogations. At one point, we
are informed, half of the interrogators in the prison were from CACI, and they
were giving orders. The interviews reveal that contractors are not subject to
military law—as one soldier points out, if he were to break the law, he
would go to jail, but when contractors break the law, they get sent home, where
they can then look for work with another company, potentially returning to Iraq.
Ignoring for a moment the rampant human rights abuses that took place at Abu
Ghraib—documented by the soldiers there and posted, in entirety, at Salon.com—the
film also points to the essential incompetence of the process. Titan, a San
Diego-based company, received $402 million for work in Iraq, including providing
4,400 translators. Greenwald interviews several of these translators, and they
all tell the same story—they were hired after a cursory interview, with
no testing for their skills or competence. Many of Titan’s translators
were, they say, “terrible,” and the translators interviewed by Greenwald
claim there were constant problems with mistranslation. Again, ignoring the
torture at Abu Ghraib, ignoring the fact that the Red Cross estimates that 70-90
percent of those held at the prison were guilty of nothing, but were simply
imprisoned during generalized sweeps—even ignoring all this, the intelligence
coming out of the prison would still have been functionally useless, because
the translations were undependable.
Then there is the special case of Halliburton, represented in Iraq by Kellogg,
Brown & Root (KBR), their engineering and construction wing. The company
enjoyed no-bid contracts for their work in the Gulf Coast, a massive windfall
that ranges somewhere upward of $12.4 billion, no doubt assisted by the fact
that the company’s former CEO is our nation’s current Vice President.
Dick Cheney claims he no longer has any financial ties to Halliburton, despite
drawing a deferred annual salary somewhere in excess of $150,000, and despite
the fact that he owns more than 400,000 shares of unexercised stock options.
Some of the most harrowing stories in “Iraq for Sale” come from
former Halliburton employees about their experiences in Iraq.  One,
a former water purification specialist named Ben Carter, begins sobbing as he
tells of discovering that his company was cutting corners by not properly treating
the water Halliburton provided to the troops. American soldiers were bathing
and drinking water that, according to Carter’s tests, were swimming with
pathogens, but when he reported this to his superiors, he was barred from discussing
it with the military.
Greenwald also interviews Bill Peterson and Edward Sanchez, two American truck
drivers hired by KBR to transport fuel across Iraq, and who are survivors of
an incident known as the Good Friday Massacre of April 9, 2004. In this instance,
KBR knowingly sent a convoy of 19 trucks down a closed road where a military
battle was still taking place. The trucks were attacked, and the survivors provide
a harrowing narration of being trapped in their vehicles as gunfire bursts their
windows, listening to cries of terror and agony on the radio, including the
screams of fellow drivers caught in a burning truck. Six drivers were killed,
and another one is presumed to have been killed. “It was totally preventable,”
Sanchez, who was shot twice during the attacks, tells the camera. “There
was absolutely no reason for us to be there. And we had no knowledge, and one
of the first things that came across my mind was, a soldier came up to me and
said, ‘Who are you guys? What are you guys doing out there? The roads
are closed. We have been fighting those guys for over 48 hours. They own that
road out there.’ And I was like, how in the world could we [have been]
sent down here into this road.”
 The
film details several other appalling examples of this sort of deadly malfeasance,
but the most startling images in the film are those of uncontrolled waste. Thanks
to so-called “cost-plus” contacts, in which companies are guaranteed
to get reimbursed for their expenses plus an additional percentage of the expense
as profit, contractors are encouraged to spend as much money as possible—the
more they spend, the more profit they make. Greenwald shows us an Iraq in which
private contractors are trained in at five-star resorts, where companies lease
Humvies at the cost of hundreds of thousands of dollars (many times the actual
cost of the vehicles), where trucks with flat tires are burned and replaced,
as it is better business to replace the entire truck rather than bring in one
new tire. Greenwald shows bonfires in which companies burn tens of thousands
of dollars of new equipment, because the wrong equipment has been ordered. They
make more money if they simply destroy the stuff and buy new equipment. It’s
a grotesque, galling spectacle, in which empty trucks are kept in constant motion,
because companies get paid as long as the trucks move, regardless of whether
they’re actually carrying anything, even though doing so puts the drivers
at risk. Greenwald’s camera pans at one point to an enormous line of soldiers
waiting outside a tent for food. The wait, we discover, is more than an hour,
and the reason is that it is more cost effective to run the privately contracted
mess hall for a few hours a day than keep it open constantly, despite the fact
that these long lines have started to attract the attention of insurgents. “They
know when we eat,” one soldier explains, “and so they’ve been
attacking mess halls at those times.”
President Abraham Lincoln had a few terse words for war profiteers. Hearing
that soldiers were going into battle with defective weapons, he responded that
people who had profited “ought to have their devilish heads shot off.”
We are, it seems, a far way from Lincoln, too.||
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