Wednesday, July 07, 2004

Privatizing war

Some more of the benefits....

One of the scandals that has been reported but hasn't really broken yet is the way in which Halliburton gained contracts to provide services to US troops in an emergency but has been unable actually to provide those services. The summer of 2003 was hell on the troops because they had no quonset huts or air conditioning. Their shaving cream cans were exploding in the desert. Why didn't the army just build them quonset huts? Because that task had been contracted out to civilians. And why didn't civilians do the job? Because civilians cannot be ordered into a war zone, and Halliburton and KBR often simply could not put enough civilian personnel into the field to do the jobs contracted for in a timely manner. Who suffered? The US troops. Why? Because the Bush administration gave a soldier's job to wealthy civilian corporations unequipped to handle it
  Juan Cole post

....but hey, do what you want....you will anyway.

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