Spoils
of War
By Bob Herbert
11 April, 2003
Former Secretary of State
George Shultz is on the board of directors of the Bechtel Group, the
largest contractor in the U.S. and one of the finalists in the competition
to land a fat contract to help in the rebuilding of Iraq.
He is also the chairman of
the advisory board of the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq, a fiercely
pro-war group with close ties to the White House. The committee, formed
last year, made it clear from the beginning that it sought more than
the ouster of Saddam's regime. It was committed, among other things,
"to work beyond the liberation of Iraq to the reconstruction of
its economy."
War is a tragedy for some
and a boon for others. I asked Mr. Shultz if the fact that he was an
advocate of the war while sitting on the board of a company that would
benefit from it left him concerned about the appearance of a conflict
of interest.
"I don't know that Bechtel
would particularly benefit from it," he said. "But if there's
work that's needed to be done, Bechtel is the type of company that could
do it. But nobody looks at it as something you benefit from."
Jack Sheehan, a retired Marine
Corps general, is a senior vice president at Bechtel. He's also a member
of the Defense Policy Board, a government-appointed group that advises
the Pentagon on major defense issues. Its members are selected by the
under secretary of defense for policy, currently Douglas Feith, and
approved by the secretary of defense, Donald Rumsfeld.
Most Americans have never
heard of the Defense Policy Group. Its meetings are classified. The
members disclose their business interests to the Pentagon, but that
information is not available to the public.
The Center for Public Integrity,
a private watchdog group in Washington, recently disclosed that of the
30 members of the board, at least 9 are linked to companies that have
won more than $76 billion in defense contracts in 2001 and 2002.
Richard Perle was the chairman
of the board until just a few weeks ago, when he resigned the chairmanship
amid allegations of a conflict of interest. He is still on the board.
Another member is the former
C.I.A. director, James Woolsey. He's also a principal in the Paladin
Capital Group, a venture capital firm that, as the Center for Public
Integrity noted, is soliciting investments for companies that specialize
in domestic security. Mr. Woolsey is also a member of the Committee
to Liberate Iraq and is reported to be in line to play a role in the
postwar occupation.
The war against Iraq has
become one of the clearest examples ever of the influence of the military-industrial
complex that President Dwight Eisenhower warned against so eloquently
in his farewell address in 1961. This iron web of relationships among
powerful individuals inside and outside the government operates with
very little public scrutiny and is saturated with conflicts of interest.
Their goals may or may not
coincide with the best interests of the American people. Think of the
divergence of interests, for example, between the grunts who are actually
fighting this war, who have been eating sand and spilling their blood
in the desert, and the power brokers who fought like crazy to make the
war happen and are profiting from it every step of the way.
There aren't a lot of rich
kids in that desert. The U.S. military is largely working-class. The
power brokers homing in on $100 billion worth of postwar reconstruction
contracts are not.
The Pentagon and its allies
are close to achieving what they wanted all along, control of the nation
of Iraq and its bounty, which is the wealth and myriad forms of power
that flow from control of the world's second-largest oil reserves.
The transitional government
of Iraq is to be headed by a retired Army lieutenant general, Jay Garner.
His career path was typical. He moved effortlessly from his military
career to the presidency of SYColeman, a defense contractor that helped
Israel develop its Arrow missile-defense system. The iron web.
Those who dreamt of a flowering
of democracy in Iraq are advised to consider the skepticism of Brent
Scowcroft, the national security adviser to the first President Bush.
He asked: "What's going to happen the first time we hold an election
in Iraq and it turns out the radicals win? What do you do? We're surely
not going to let them take over."