The Halliburton Difference

“Dick Cheney, a protege of Rumsfeld’s in the Ford administration, has built a fortune based on the profitable prospect of a grim future, though where Rumsfeld saw a boom market in plagues, Cheney was banking on a future of war….In 1995, with Clinton in the White House, Halliburton recruited Cheney as its new boss. While the Halliburton division Brown & Root had a long history as a U.S. military contractor, under Cheney’s leadership Halliburton’s role was to expand so dramatically that it would transform the nature of modern war. Thanks to the loosely worded contract that Halliburton and Cheney had crafted when he was at the Pentagon, the company was able to stretch and expand the meaning of the term ‘logistical support’ until Halliburton was responsible for creating the entire infrastructure of a U.S. military operation overseas. All that was required of the army was to provide teh soldiers and the weapons.

“The result, first on display in the Balkans, was a kind of McMilitary experience in which deploying abroad resembed a heavily armed and perilous package vacation. ‘The first person to greet our soldiers as they arrive in the Balkans and the last one to wave goodbye is one of our employees,’ a Halliburton spokesperson explained, making the company’s staff sound more like cruise directors than army logistics coordinators. That was the Halliburton difference: Cheney saw no reason why war shouldn’t be a thriving part of America’s highly profitable service economy — invasion with a smile.

“In the Balkans, where Clinton deployed nineteen thousand soldiers, U.S. bases sprang up as mini Halliburton cities: neat, gated suburbs, built and run entirely by the company. And Halliburton was committed to providing the troops with all the comforts of home, including fast-food outlets, supermarkets, movie theaters and high-tech gyms. Some senior officers wondered what the strip-malling of the military would do to troop discipline — but they too were enjoying the perks. ‘Everything with Halliburton was gold-plated,’ one told me. ‘So we weren’t complaining.’

“In just five years at Halliburton, Cheney almost doubled the mount of money the company extracted from the U.S. Treasury, from $1.2 billion to $2.3 billion, while the amount it received in federal loans and loan guarantees increased fifteenfold.

And he was well-rewarded for his efforts. Before taking office as vice president, Cheney ‘valued his net worth at between $18 million and $81.9 million, including between $6 million and $30 million worth of stock in Halliburton Co’” — Naomi Klein, Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2007), 291, 292.

Doug Jones