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Bechtel drums up war
business
By Pratap Chatterjee
SAN FRANCISCO - Engineers and executives from
San Francisco-based Bechtel, one of the world's largest
construction firms, will kick off a road show this week
for companies that want to win contracts in the
reconstruction of Iraq.
The first conference was
due to be held a block from the White House at the
Ronald Reagan Building on Wednesday. Two days later, the
UK Department of Trade and Industry will host a meeting
for the company at the Novotel in Hammersmith in
southwest London; the final stop is May 28 at the
Sheraton hotel in Kuwait City.
Bechtel expects to
answer questions on the selection of subcontractors,
insurance requirements and performance securities for
winning bids to implement the firm's US$680 million
reconstruction deal awarded by the US Agency for
International Development (USAID) on April 17.
"Bechtel is honored to have been asked to help
bring humanitarian assistance, economic recovery and
infrastructure reconstruction to the Iraqi people," Tom
Hash, president of Bechtel National, said in a news
release at the time.
Several interested bidders
have already followed Terry Valenzano, Bechtel's manager
for Iraq reconstruction, to the Crowne Plaza and Hilton
resort in Kuwait, where the engineering teams are based,
alongside many top military officials.
The
traveling trade show illustrates the central role that
business has played in the attack and occupation of Iraq
by US-led forces, and to what extent the lines between
Wall Street and the Pentagon have become blurred.
Major companies have already begun working in
Iraq. Oil giants British Petroleum (BP) and Shell have
sent employees to southern Iraq to work for a common
British boss, Major Mark Tilley, who has been appointed
interim chief executive of Iraq's South Refineries by
the occupying forces.
Paul Vick and Scott
Hayward, construction managers for Houston-based
engineering company Halliburton, recently arrived in the
cities of Basra and Umm Qasr respectively to oversee
repairs, under the supervision of Brigadier General
Robert Crear, US Army Corps of Engineers.
US-led
forces have already contracted out much of this
nation-building to US companies or their former
employees: Phil Carroll, the former head of
Houston-based Shell Oil and construction giant Fluor,
has been appointed head of a new advisory board that
will oversee the activities of an oil ministry.
Halliburton, which was secretly given the
contract to douse the oil fires set by Saddam Hussein's
regime, hired two Houston-based companies - Boots &
Coots International Well Control and Wild Well Control -
to put out the fires. Now the firm is overseeing repair
of the oil refineries, running the pipelines and
trucking propane to Iraqi consumers.
The
contracts have become political hot potatoes because the
administration of US President George W Bush never
offered them for competitive bidding or mentioned them
publicly until well after the work began, despite the
fact that they were signed months before the attack even
started.
"It certainly gives me the sense they
have something to hide," said Congressman Henry Waxman
from California, the ranking Democrat on the House
Government Reform Committee and a longtime critic of
Vice President Dick Cheney. "I don't know if they do,
but they're certainly acting that way." Cheney was chief
executive officer of Halliburton, the company that has
won the most contracts in the "war on terrorism".
Scott Saunders, a spokesman for the Corps of
Engineers, says Halliburton may be permitted to export
Iraqi oil in the future, so that the country can
generate money to pay for the rebuilding process, unless
Iraqis "can reconstitute their oil industry and
bureaucracy quickly enough" to do the job themselves.
Meanwhile, Stevedoring Services of America is
hard at work rebuilding Iraqi seaports, while Airlink
USA is waiting in the wings to refurbish the airports as
soon as they are repaired. The actual construction work
is being done by Iraqi workers, who clamor for the
$2-a-day jobs in the stifling heat.
Struggling
to maintain law and order, the US military has turned to
yet another US multinational to run a new Iraqi police
force: Dyncorp, whose recruiters are manning phones just
outside Forth Worth, Texas, to hire "individuals with
appropriate experience and expertise to participate in
an international effort to re-establish police, justice
and prison functions in post-conflict Iraq".
Many of these companies were hired even before
the invasion began on March 20. For example, BP
engineers traveled with the troops as the war was
launched, to help them seize the oil wells.
Halliburton had 1,800 employees in the Kuwaiti
desert setting up tent cities, providing food and
washing clothes for the soldiers before the invasion,
while Dyncorp employees patrolled the perimeters of army
bases to keep out angry civilians.
Inside the
Kuwaiti bases, Military Professionals Resources Inc
(MPRI) of Alexandria, Virginia, a private company set up
by ex-US military generals, trained men to use weapons.
Back in California, two San Diego companies were
hired for more secretive operations before the war:
Titan corporation was recruiting Kurdish spies and
translators while its neighbors, Science Applications
International Corp, was hired to run a government of
Iraqis in exile.
The wholesale privatization of
the US military is not surprising given that the three
bureaucrats whom Bush hired to run the army, navy and
air force when he became president in 2000 were all
plucked from corporate America: Gordon England of
General Dynamics was appointed secretary of the navy,
James Roche of Northrop Grumman was appointed air force
secretary and Thomas White of Enron was appointed
secretary of the army.
Although all three men
have resigned in the past 12 months, the two former
military men recruited to run Iraq, Jay Garner and Paul
Bremer, were chief executives of consulting companies to
the multinationals - SY Technologies and Marsh McLellan.
SY helps design missiles, while Marsh advises companies
in crisis.
Richard Perle, former head of the
Pentagon's Defense Policy Board, was advising Goldman
Sachs investors on Wall Street about reconstruction
contracts.
Harvey Wasserman, author of The
Last Energy War, calls the private military
contracts a scandal. "The Bush-Cheney team have turned
the United States into a family business. That's why we
haven't seen Cheney - he's cutting deals with his old
buddies, who gave him a multimillion-dollar golden
handshake," he said. "Have they no grace, no shame, no
common sense?"
(Inter Press
Service)
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