C.E.O. Cheney was earning his bonus in Iraq dirty 'bidness'

from One year ago ---


"Public Enemy No. 1 today is a government that Vice President Dick Cheney was in effect helping shore up just a couple of years ago. "



http://www.nytimes.com/2002/10/11/opinion/11KRIS.html

Revolving-Door Monsters
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF


President Bush and Vice President Cheney portray Saddam Hussein as so menacing and terrifying that one might think they've lain awake at night for years worrying about him.
But when Mr. Cheney was running Halliburton, the oil services firm, it sold more equipment to Iraq than any other company did. As first reported by The Financial Times on Nov. 3, 2000, Halliburton subsidiaries submitted $23.8 million worth of contracts with Iraq to the United Nations in 1998 and 1999 for approval by its sanctions committee.

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..Public Enemy No. 1 today is a government that Mr. Cheney was in effect helping shore up just a couple of years ago.

More broadly, the U.S. has a long history in which Saddam, though just as monstrous as he is today, was coddled as our monster. In the 1980's we provided his army with satellite intelligence so that it could use chemical weapons against Iranian soldiers. When Saddam used nerve gas and mustard gas against Kurds in 1988, the Reagan administration initially tried to blame Iran. We shipped seven strains of anthrax to Iraq between 1978 and 1988.

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We need to be wary that we are not just pursuing the latest fashion in monsters. Iran was the menace of the 1980's, so we snuggled up with Iraq. The Soviet threat led us to cuddle with Islamic fundamentalists like those now trying to blow us up.

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If we spent money on hypocrisy detectors as well as anthrax detectors, they would be buzzing. For example, Republicans are trying to defeat the Democratic senator Tim Johnson of South Dakota by running commercials featuring Saddam Hussein.
...The fact is that neither Tim Johnson nor any lily-livered columnist ever bolstered Saddam's government the way Vice President Cheney did — perfectly legitimately — in 1998-99.

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Old monsters like Libya, North Korea and Iran have proved — well, not ephemeral, but at least changeable, less terrifying today than they used to be. And the Iraqi threat, for which we're now prepared to sacrifice hundreds or thousands of American casualties, just a few years ago was simply another tinhorn dictatorship where C.E.O. Cheney was earning his bonus.

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KBR can go anywhere in the world and extract / move crude oil. It does not matter what the geography or the political situation is (almost).

They are a great company to work for. They treat their employees VERY well and pay them VERY well.

No one else can do what they do, thus the non-competes for contracts.

Also, they were likely replacing equiptment for the UN Oil for Food Program. They would have had to gone through the UN for the contract and, of course, they won it because no one can do it as well for the same cost.

This Halliburton thing really has no political / legal traction except with the hard-core dems. There are many other issues that are legit that ought to be tended to.