Halliburton: a hand in every pocket ( book review)

The Halliburton Agenda:
The Politics of Oil and Money

By Dan Briody
John Wiley & Sons,
279 pages, $33.99

This is a classic American love story of our time. Ambitious influential politician meets beautifully greedy corporation. They are made for each other. To the pounding of oil-pumping and war-making profits, they pursue their passion. Through the forbidding labyrinth of government contracts, they chart their destiny. In the glaring wilds of Texas and Arabia, in the discreet soft glow of suites from White House to Congress, they consummate their union. They grow gloriously rich and powerful, and live happily ever after.

Well, almost. There are awkward charges of obscenity in the affair. Obscene influence. Obscene profiteering. Nevertheless, the politician comes gallantly to the defence of their virtue, and he is a soothing sort who reassures friends, foils enemies and generally eludes even the obvious. He is hardly the company's first powerful consort. Every self-perpetuating Pentagon contractor needs a string of well-connected champions. In any case, they have little to fear from a political opposition equally compromised by the accepted culture of grasping. Their plunder is as American as apple pie and cost overruns.

Award-winning business journalist Dan Briody has written in The Halliburton Agenda a marvellous little primer on how things work at part of the darker, seedier business end of the United States' post-cold war imperium. As in his bestselling The Iron Triangle, an exposé of the furtive Carlyle Group of national security wheeler-dealers, Briody is showing us secrets that tend to lie in plain sight at every hand, at least for any reasonably sentient observer of Washington politics and governance beyond the civics-class public façade. It is a mark of the pervasive and cynical complicity he portrays, and of his distinction amid a sadly failed journalism, that what ought to be banal comes as revelation.

The star of the book, of course, the soothing courtier and politician in question, is Vice-President Dick Cheney, who became Halliburton's CEO in 1995, and after leading some of the most extraordinary rooting at the government trough in the history of crony capitalism, went on in 2000 to become George W. Bush's regent. Cheney took with him from a grateful corporation more than $30-million (U.S.) in a golden parachute and stock-option personal fortune, and a readiness, we now know, to enrich his old company still more in the punitive expedition to Iraq.

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