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Tuesday, Feb 9, 2010
Having trouble keeping track of all the Bush-Cheney pals who have their snouts in Iraq's trough? Here's a handy clip 'n' save guide!
Oct 9, 2003 | On Sept. 17, the Bush administration handed Congress a spending bill that reads like a bleeding-heart liberal's legislative fantasy, a massive, government-funded infrastructure revitalization program of the kind not seen since the days of FDR: It calls for $800 million for the police, $300 million for firefighters, and almost $3 billion for clean water systems. It sets aside tens of millions of dollars to build thousands of new public housing units, but it warns that much more money will be needed in the future. The bill allocates about $1 billion to spend on healthcare, including $150 million for a state-of-the-art children's hospital. There's even $5 million to build a women's center and a million dollars for a new museum.
Is George W. Bush finally displaying the compassion long advertised to run through his brand of conservatism? Not exactly. As you may have guessed, this particular plan isn't aimed at fixing the problems of Boston or Boise but those of Baghdad and Basra and Tikrit and Najaf. Congress is now debating -- and, after many adjustments, will likely approve -- the president's plan to rebuild Iraq's schools, hospitals, highways, prisons, the electricity grid, railroads, and every other institution of civilized society; of the $87 billion the administration seeks, about $20 billion is earmarked for Iraqi nation-building.
Iraq desperately needs rebuilding, and it might seem churlish to question what the administration has requested. But when the price tag is in the tens of billions, one can't help wondering: How much money will actually find its way into the hands of Iraqis? Who will profit from this reconstruction windfall?
In Congress, Democrats are asking the same questions -- and many are saying that the spending request is nothing but a huge gift to Bush's moneyed friends. "Item after item [in the request] reads like a government contractor's wish list," Rep. Henry Waxman, a California Democrat, wrote in a recent letter to the White House's Office of Management and Budget.
Is Waxman right? Is the rebuilding request tailor-made to pad the accounts of U.S. corporations, and in particular, those with good connections to the White House? It's hard to get definitive answers to this question, mostly because nobody seems to know how much money Iraq needs, and, consequently, whether the president's plan is too big, too small, or just right.
"I'm hard-pressed to criticize the particular numbers -- I can see an argument for why all of these things could be good for Iraq," says Bathsheba Crocker, a post-conflict reconstruction expert at the Center for Strategic & International Studies. "But that doesn't mean that the U.S. taxpayer can or should afford all of these things, and you do have to protect against padding of the contracts."
This reconstruction fog raises all sorts of vexing problems for the average concerned citizen. You want to support the rebuilding in Iraq, but you don't want to overpay. You want to make sure the Iraqis get what they need, but you're not too thrilled about Halliburton getting a blank check. It'd be great if the work was done in a transparent manner, but since when does a government program work like that? And is there a danger of the president's pals making off with the biggest prizes -- and are they trying to do that? Of course.
What you need is a guide to the main players in Iraq -- a handy list of the various interests who are winning, trying to win, losing, and trying not to lose. You need to know what makes the work in Iraq so expensive, and so prone to cozy political relationships. And you need to see why rebuilding the country is going to be a long, difficult, ugly process.
Fortunately, we have created such a guide for you:
The lobbyists. Late in September, the Washington newspaper The Hill reported that some of the president's closest political allies had created a new firm, New Bridge Strategies, whose main goal is to help corporations "evaluate and take advantage of business opportunities in the Middle East following the conclusion of the U.S.-led war in Iraq." The company, which is headed by Joe Allbaugh, Bush's chief of staff in Texas and his campaign manager in 2000, was not exactly hard to find -- it has a Web site that boasts of its intimate ties to government officials: "New Bridge Strategies principals have years of public policy experience," the site says. The company's directors "have held positions in the Reagan Administration and both Bush Administrations and are particularly well suited to working with international agencies in the executive branch, Department of Defense and the U.S. Agency for International Development, the American rebuilding apparatus and establishing early links to Congress." Other New Bridge partners include Ed Rogers, vice chairman of the lobbying firm Barbour Griffith & Rogers, and a close political aide to George H.W. Bush; and Lanny Griffith, also at Barbour Griffith, who served in several positions in Bush senior's White House, including as Southern political director in the 1988 campaign.
You might think it a bit unseemly for the president's close friends to use their proximity to power to profit from a war that the administration assured us had nothing to do with profiteering, but that's only because you're naive. According to Allbaugh and the others at New Bridge, having friends in high places is no reason not to make money; that's how things work in Washington, it's not at all unusual. "Because my friend is president of the United States, I'm supposed to check out of life?" Allbaugh asked the New York Times on Friday. (Nobody at New Bridge Strategies -- nor at any of Washington's other lobbying firms looking for work in Iraq -- returned Salon's repeated calls.) "I have nothing to hide. I'm straightforward. I deal my cards on top of the table," Allbaugh told the newspaper, and he added that there was in fact something honorable about working in Iraq. "We fought a war, we displaced a horrible, horrible regime, and as a part of that we have an obligation to help Iraqis. We can't just leave in the middle of the night."
On its Web site, New Bridge Strategies says that the business opportunities in Iraq are of an "unprecedented nature and scope," but what that means specifically is left up in the air. So far, it appears that New Bridge's only public client is MCT Corp., a cellular phone company based in Alexandria, Va., that has previously built phone systems in the former Soviet Union and Afghanistan. In August, MCT and New Bridge Strategies submitted a bid to build the mobile system in Iraq, but New Bridge's political ties do not appear to have helped it very much. On Monday, the Iraqi communications ministry announced that it had awarded mobile phone bids to three Middle Eastern firms.
But that may have just been New Bridge's bad luck. In Iraq, virtually everything that gets built is built with the approval, if not by decree, of Washington -- which is, after all, funding the entire endeavor. Undignified as it may appear, New Bridge's pitch is rather logical, and after the new spending bill is signed, it's likely that many companies will decide that the best way to get to Baghdad is by way of K Street.
And perhaps that's why New Bridge Strategies is not the only lobbying firm looking to push work in Iraq. On Oct. 2, the Washington Post reported that the Livingston Group, the firm headed by former Rep. Robert Livingston -- the Republican whose plans to become speaker of the House in 1998 unraveled when it was revealed that he'd carried on an extramarital affair -- is also quite interested in working for companies looking to take part in the Iraqi reconstruction. One firm Livingston is helping is De La Rue, a British paper company. De La Rue has already received a contract to print Iraq's new currency, and it wants to work on secure travel documents, too. A Livingston lobbyist told the Post that he was rather busy pitching De La Rue's case to a number of influential members of Congress. "We're trying to get the right people to ask the right questions of the right people," he said.
De La Rue, incidentally, provides a good indication of how lucrative working in Iraq can be. The company's fortunes had been flagging recently; in July, the Justice Department began an investigation of De La Rue to see if one of its subsidiaries was involved in a scheme to fix the prices of holographic security stickers used for Visa credit cards -- news of the investigation sank De La Rue's stock. Thanks to Iraq, things now look fine for the firm. In September, the company said that its profits would soar, mostly due to its reconstruction work.
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