The Great Iraq Swindle- How Bush Allowed an Army of For-Profit Contractors to Invade the U.S. Treasury

As any reader of this blog knows, I believe Matt Taibbi of Rolling Stone is the best political analyst and writer working today. His importance as a journalist cannot be overstated. His bravery and cunning are at a new high with his investigative piece for the latest issue of Rolling Stone.

Quite simply, he has written a piece that should be read by every American citizen. If you pay taxes. If you vote. If you have ever supported the War in Iraq. If you have ever served in the military or love someone in the military, especially someone serving in Iraq, you must read this article.

If 25% of this article is accurate (and I believe it is much higher), there are people and companies working in Iraq that are treasonous war profiteers, some of whom are ex-military and ex-office holders. We already has these hunches and have seen reports, but this is huge. If Congress had any guts (which it doesn't), it would force high level hearings and investigations of these goings on.

Here is a link to the article.

If you have an incredibly short attention span or need a teaser, here is the link to a 4 minute video by Taibbi giving a synopsis of what has happened.

Be prepared. If you are not a completely partisan political hack, this article will anger you on many levels. If it does not anger you, or you feel it is liberal media bashing, help me to understand your point of view on this.

Thank you to Matt Taibbi for doing the most Christian thing a journalist can do... taking your calling seriously and bringing that which is in the dark into the light of day.

a teaser passage for you.

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 f--- 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.

It was an awful idea, perhaps the worst America has ever tried on foreign soil. But if you were in on it, it was great work while it lasted.

and

Such excuses speak to a monstrous vacuum of patriotism; it would be hard to imagine contractors being so blithely disinterested in results during World War II, where every wasted dollar might mean another American boy dead from gangrene in the Ardennes. But the rampant waste of money and resources also suggests a widespread contempt for the ostensible "purpose" of our presence in Iraq. Asked to cast a vote for the war effort, contractors responded by swiping everything they could get their hands on -- and the administration's acquiescence in their thievery suggests that it, too, saw making a buck as the true mission of the war. Two witnesses scheduled to testify before Congress against Custer Battles ultimately declined not only because they had received death threats but because they, too, were contractors and feared that they would be shut out of future government deals. To repeat: Witnesses were afraid to testify in an effort to ­recover government funds because they feared reprisal from the government.

lastly

For the most part, nobody at home cared, because war on some level is always a waste. But what happened in Iraq went beyond inefficiency, beyond fraud even. This was about the business of government being corrupted by the profit motive to such an extraordinary degree that now we all have to wonder how we will ever be able to depend on the state to do its job in the future. If catastrophic failure is worth billions, where's the incentive to deliver success? There's no profit in patriotism, no cost-plus angle on common decency. Sixty years after America liberated Europe, those are just words, and words don't pay the bills.