Halliburton: a hand in every pocket : Houston Indymedia

By ROGER MORRIS Saturday, May 1, 2004 - Page D13

Well, almost. There are awkward charges of obscenity in the affair. Obscene influence. Obscene profiteering. Nevertheless, the politician comes gallantly to the defence of their virtue, and he is a soothing sort who reassures friends, foils enemies and generally eludes even the obvious. He is hardly the company's first powerful consort. Every self-perpetuating Pentagon contractor needs a string of well-connected champions. In any case, they have little to fear from a political opposition equally compromised by the accepted culture of grasping. Their plunder is as American as apple pie and cost overruns.

Award-winning business journalist Dan Briody has written in The Halliburton Agenda a marvellous little primer on how things work at part of the darker, seedier business end of the United States' post-cold war imperium. As in his bestselling The Iron Triangle, an exposé of the furtive Carlyle Group of national security wheeler-dealers, Briody is showing us secrets that tend to lie in plain sight at every hand, at least for any reasonably sentient observer of Washington politics and governance beyond the civics-class public façade. It is a mark of the pervasive and cynical complicity he portrays, and of his distinction amid a sadly failed journalism, that what ought to be banal comes as revelation.

The star of the book, of course, the soothing courtier and politician in question, is Vice-President Dick Cheney, who became Halliburton's CEO in 1995, and after leading some of the most extraordinary rooting at the government trough in the history of crony capitalism, went on in 2000 to become George W. Bush's regent. Cheney took with him from a grateful corporation more than $30-million (U.S.) in a golden parachute and stock-option personal fortune, and a readiness, we now know, to enrich his old company still more in the punitive expedition to Iraq.

That the Vice-President also left behind a shroud of scandalous practices, from accounting manipulations and bribery of government officials to corrupt dealings with Saddam Hussein's Iraq and an eventual shareholder-shattering asbestos liability, was scarcely a secret at the time. But after the obligatory summaries of the "controversy," by which the mainstream U.S. media acquit their self-defined, nicely self-limiting professional obligation in such matters, that record -- who and what Halliburton really was, and what its essence said about Cheney -- never rose to the level of an election issue. So much, after all, was standard practice.

Only when the company's monopolization of potential billions in occupation contracts in Iraq became too egregious to be ignored did the subject reappear. Even now, however, watched closely but essentially unchecked by the media or politics, Halliburton goes on its highly profitable way in Mesopotamia and elsewhere, with no questions asked about the larger system that makes it all possible.

Briody's concise, well-written account gives us back a neglected history. It is a now charming, now maddening tale of how an obscure oil-field services business in 1920s Texas expanded, then exploded, to become an empire of its own as arguably the single most crucial and powerful private purveyor to the 21st-century U.S. military. Like the story of the United States' lost innocence, which it parallels and represents so strikingly, it was not always a matter of snatch and grab and glib evasion. Erle Halliburton, the roughneck who founded the company in 1919, was a tower of business rectitude who despised the profiteering and political influence with which his name would one day be synonymous.

By 1962, however, Halliburton acquired Kellogg Brown & Root, Texas's notoriously political construction company, in what soon proved a Faustian bargain for profit and expansion, KBR a poison draught extinguishing Halliburton's founding ethic. The ruthless political machine of George and Herman Brown was legend, owning politicians from Lyndon Johnson on down. Not having given his permission for Johnson to accept the vice-presidential nomination under John F. Kennedy in 1960, Brown first heard the news on the radio, and snarled typically to an aide, "Who told him he could do that?"

Briody adds little to the record of KBR's suborning. Setting it in the lineage of Halliburton, however, he has given us a telling reminder of the continuity of corruption and corrupting in the U.S. military-industrial oligarchy. He tolls quickly but graphically some of the horrendous cost -- from the destruction of Leland Olds, a promising Texas politician whose very different view of economic equity and corporate-government responsibility was swept aside by Johnson's KBR-programmed rise, to the Vietnam and Cold War profiteering that was the parent to today's looting.

Briody's most valuable service, though, is to trace clearly and succinctly the lineage of the Logistics Civil Augmentation Program, the Leviathan LOGCAP that has evolved into what he aptly calls "America's Super Contract" of military construction and services, grown out of the privatizing craze led by then-secretary of defense Dick Cheney in the wake of the first Gulf War in the early 1990s. How Halliburton-Brown & Root worked the system to gain that multibillion-dollar colossus, how it in effect designed its own contract, and how it has arrived at a de facto monopoly dominance the United States Government is unwilling to reject and unable to curb, is one of the more haunting sequences in U.S. history.

As Briody shows, there will be no early rescue from that descent. Cheney, the Bush Administration at large and the forces they represent may be a blatant, often crude exaggeration of some of the worst trends in government-business collusion, but they are only different in degree, not in kind. With the notable lonely exception of figures like Democratic Congressman Henry Waxman of California, the Democrats pose no real reform threat to the vastly corrupted system. Cheney, after all, enriched himself and his corporation with such impunity after 1995 not at the hand of a Republican regime but of Bill Clinton's. Halliburton's hold on the United States and the inner politics of corporate exploitation, Briody reminds us, are nothing if not bipartisan.

Roger Morris, whose Richard Milhous Nixon won a National Book Award Silver Medal, is the author of several works of U.S. history and presidential biography, and is completing a history of U.S. covert policy in Central Asia.