The Insider's War

Perhaps when the Iraq war is dissected by historians, it will come to be known as the Insider's War. It was instigated by a small group of people breathing the rarified air of pure power, feeding themselves a diet of refined information pre-designed to support ideas and theories developed in isolation in the hot house of utopian thought.

The war was waged by true-believers in the transformative power of profit. It was staffed with disciples of the creed, young, inexperienced political apointees. Selected corporations, the bearers of the American Dream under this administration, would do the work and reap the profits.

The problem to American taxpayers and the threat to the future of Iraq, is that corporations do not really share common goals with individuals, families, churches or governments. The goal of a corporation is profit. They will pursue profit to the limit of the law and sometimes beyond it. If their are no limits, then corporations make profitable decisions accordingly.

When handpicked corporations are given the power to plunder without limit in a failed or failing state, there is little hope of true economic recovery. There is only subsidized thievery. The thieves rob twice. First if given the opportuity, they take your tax dollar for themselves. Next they take the economic opportunity Iraqis need to create sustaining businesses.

Circumstances like these do not foster recovery. They lead to further conflict, which we see in Iraq.

When the origami of the Iraq war and it's aftermath is unfolded, the corporations will have to answer to the law if their appetite for profit led them out of its bounds. Their numbers will be legion. We all know Halliburton overcharged for gas. On Friday Custer Battles LLC was named in a suit alledging it had defrauded US Taxpayers of tens of millions of dollars in a scam to provide security for the Baghdad airport.

Tellingly,

The Bush administration decided not to join the whistleblowers' civil suit alleging fraud against the company, run by a former Republican congressional candidate. The whistleblowers' attorney said a Justice Department lawyer told him the reason was that the alleged victim was the U.S.-financed and led Coalition Provisional Authority, not the U.S. government.

The Bush administration's grand economic experiment is failing in Iraq. Be very aware, the President and Co. are running the same one here. During the last three years, there has been unprecidented corporate access to the whitehouse combined with a torrent of legislation designed to optimize profit at the expense of the environment, worker saftey, jobs, accountability, the financial well-being of the government and the integrity of Social Security. If George Bush wins the election this November 2, it will take longer to rearrange America in Iraq's economic image. But it will be done with the same disaterous results.