In short, Iraq is a huge profit center for Global Corporation, Inc., and George Bush and Dick Cheney are the Senior Vice Presidents of the United States Government Division of that money-making concern.

An article in the current issue of Rolling Stone does the best job I have ever seen anywhere in laying out in nauseating detail the workings of this criminal money-laundering scheme that some people have called "the Iraq War." In it, Matt Taibbi descends into - quite literally - the fecal underbelly of the world of Iraq war profiteering. Giving example after infuriating example, Taibbi relentlessly pushes the needle on his readers' Outrage Meters harder and harder against the peg, until finally one cannot read anymore without leaping up from one's chair and screaming out in sheer, visceral, well, outrage.

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 fuck 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.

Those two paragraphs are the best summary of the shame/clusterfuck/outrage/crime that is the "Iraq war" that I have ever read.

Taibbi writes of the incredible abuses of Halliburton/KBR, Parsons, Bechtel and Custer Battles. Virtually all of his examples are familiar to diligent readers of DailyKos, with the possible exception of the unbelievable story of Russell Skoug, an Air Force vet who went to work for a contractor named Wolfpack, and was crippled in an IED explosion while convoying at night.

You've just gotta read the article; I cannot possibly do it justice here. Suffice to say, I insisted my wife read it. She couldn't get all the way through it; it was too much for her. But she said, "Can't something be done about this?" I told her, short of impeachment, not really. "So, is anyone doing something about impeachment?"

I had no heart to tell her the answer to that question.





I like to believe that Taibbi's article, if it were read by everyone in America, would bring the occupation of Iraq to an end in a hurry. My guess is that it would make people's blood boil to the point that American taxpayers and military families would be screaming for justice upon those responsible for such a travesty.

Please read it, and make sure as many people as you can, read it as well. Better yet, show Rolling Stone some love, and go out and buy a hard copy or three at the newsstand, and leave them around where others can read them.





Of course, even if all of this mind-boggling malfeasance ever gets the public airing it deserves, even that revelation itself will serve the agenda of the Grover Norquistian rightwingers: It will utterly undermine faith in government:

According to the most reliable ­estimates, we have doled out more than $500 billion for the war, as well as $44 billion for the Iraqi reconstruction effort. And what did America's contractors give us for that money? They built big steaming shit piles, set brand-new trucks on fire, drove back and forth across the desert for no reason at all and dumped bags of nails in ditches. 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.

Perfect. "Mission Accomplished," indeed.