Foibles of the Reconstruction
The New York Times is running a story about how Vice President Cheney’s pals at Halliburton are capitalizing on their original (secretly awarded) contract to assist in the reconstruction of Iraq. Halliburton, based on the information it gathered in its initial contract and their dealings with the Army Corps of Engineers, now appears to have the inside track in securing followup contracts that could be worth hundreds of millions of dollars.
Here’s an excerpt:
The Bechtel Group, one of the world’s biggest engineering and construction companies, has dropped out of the running for a contract to rebuild the Iraqi oil industry, as other competitors have begun to conclude that the bidding process favors the one company already working in Iraq, Halliburton.
You’ve accomplished something if you can get the best of Bechtel.
And then there’s this odd story from the Los Angeles Times (registration required) about U.S. Plans to Supply AK-47s to the newly formed Iraqi Army. Evidently the civilian transition team has initiated a process to buy 34,000 new AK-47s, notwithstanding the fact that our military has found or seized more than enough of them to supply the need. Here’s what an Army spokesman said when told of the move:
‘That’s surprising,’ said Army Capt. Jeff Fitzgibbons, a task force spokesman in Baghdad. ‘It would seem to me odd that we’re out there looking to buy more weapons for a place where we’ve already captured and set aside so many of them. It would raise a red flag for me, that’s for sure.’
In the inimitable words from Cool Hand Luke: what we’ve got here is a failure to communicate!
The Foibles of the Reconstruction by SharedThought, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.