Add new comment

The Great Iraq Swindle

Submitted by Bill St. Clair on Tue, 2007-08-28 04:50.

Rolling Stone - "How Bush Allowed an Army of For-Profit Contractors to Invade the U.S. Treasury." Wanna know the real reason the United States invaded Iraq? Follow the money. I knew the Busheviks were bad, but I can't find any adjectives for the behavior of their war contractors in Iraq, except perhaps "inhuman." [skype]

Quote:
Operation Iraqi Freedom, it turns out, was never a war against Saddam ­Hussein's Iraq. It was an invasion of the federal budget, and no occupying force in history has ever been this efficient. George W. Bush's war in the Mesopotamian desert was an experiment of sorts, a crude first take at his vision of a fully privatized American government. In Iraq the lines between essential government services and for-profit enterprises have been blurred to the point of absurdity -- to the point where wounded soldiers have to pay retail prices for fresh underwear, where modern-day chattel are imported from the Third World at slave wages to peel the potatoes we once assigned to grunts in KP, where private companies are guaranteed huge profits no matter how badly they fuck things up.

And just maybe, reviewing this appalling history of invoicing orgies and million-dollar boondoggles, it's not so far-fetched to think that this is the way someone up there would like things run all over -- not just in Iraq but in Iowa, too, with the state police working for Corrections Corporation of America, and DHL with the contract to deliver every Christmas card. And why not? What the Bush administration has created in Iraq is a sort of paradise of perverted capitalism, where revenues are forcibly extracted from the customer by the state, and obscene profits are handed out not by the market but by an unaccountable government bureauc­racy. This is the triumphant culmination of two centuries of flawed white-people thinking, a preposterous mix of authoritarian socialism and laissez-faire profit­eering, with all the worst aspects of both ideologies rolled up into one pointless, supremely idiotic military adventure -- American men and women dying by the thousands, so that Karl Marx and Adam Smith can blow each other in a Middle Eastern glory hole.

( categories: Politics )

Reply



The content of this field is kept private and will not be shown publicly.


*

  • Allowed HTML tags: <a> <em> <strong> <cite> <code> <ul> <ol> <li> <dl> <dt> <dd> <i> <b> <u>
  • Lines and paragraphs break automatically.
  • Web and e-mail addresses are automatically converted into links.
  • You may quote other posts using [quote] tags.
  • Easily link to terms in various wikis. For help, see interwiki.
  • Easily link to terms in various wikis. For help, see interwiki.
  • You may quote other posts using [quote] tags.
  • You can use BBCode tags in the text, URLs will be automatically converted to links
Verify comment authorship
Captcha Image: you will need to recognize the text in it.
*
Please type in the letters/numbers that are shown in the image above.