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Book Review by Larry
Sakin
I'm no pacifist. Sometimes
wars are necessary to stave off empirical powers from encroachment
upon sovereign territories. World War II is an example of a horrible
yet necessary war which was needed to keep the Axis Powers from
overrunning Europe, Africa and the Near East. While the cruelty
of that war has been chronicled over the last sixty years, the end
result was a reconstruction effort for Europe so ambitious that
it seemed unfathomable at the time. It was called the Marshall Plan,
and anyone familiar with 20th Century world history understands
how significant this effort was.
Since the time of The
Marshall Plan, the nature of war has changed. In the case of the
United States vs. Iraq, a number of scenarios were used to justify
a second US intervention in the country, none of which have the
ring of truth. One of those scenarios includes the one proposed
by LA Times Washington correspondent T. Christian Miller in his
extremely comprehensive
Blood Money: Wasted Billions, Lost Lives,
and Corporate Greed in Iraq. Miller, who has painstakingly
researched his hypothesis, offers the rehabilitation of Iraq as
a main reason for the war in the first place.
While President George
W. Bush tried to use the rehabilitation of Iraq as his version of
a Marshall Plan for the Near East, Miller uncovers thousands of
government documents which reveal that re-construction corporations
like Halliburton/KBR were in on the plans for war from the beginning,
and were shoe-ins for no bid government contracts before one US
soldier landed on Iraqi soil. Beyond this, Miller accentuates the
bungling of government overseers in Washington and Baghdad too immersed
in the partisan politics they believed in to notice the incredible
fraud and waste of taxpayer and Iraqi cash that enhanced the insurgent
revolt now dominating Iraq. Worse, Miller notes incidents of over
500 killings of contractor employees, and alleges assassinations
of military men and contractors who tried to halt the abuse.
While at times Miller
can be a bit heavy-handed stylistically, this book puts the reader
inside the heads of working people just trying to feed their families
while dodging Improvised Explosive Devices on jagged highways where
supplies, ammunition, and oil were transported, a gauntlet many
workers were unsure they'd survive each night. It follows the money,
which is surreptitiously laundered through Middle Eastern currency
traders and sent to contractors supplying sub-par equipment for
coalition forces. And it connotes the inter-office squabbling of
Pentagon bureaucrats who pissed away critical time in providing
adequate cover for US troops fighting the insurgency. Above all,
Blood
Money shows how easily the Bush administration and
the Coalition Provisional Authority spent more time covering the
asses of their friends in the contracting world while letting young
American men and women die for the lack of proper armament. Blood
Money is a sprawling work that will leave you aghast
and exhausted after reading each chapter.
You don't have to be
a pacifist to find yourself opposed to the methods used by Bush,
former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and his Pentagon staff
to build their so-called democratic Iraq. You just need a modicum
of common sense. Blood
Money will flood your mind with heavy doses of it.
I dare anyone to defend the actions of the Bush administration after
reading this remarkable work
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