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I am currently reading Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq’s Green Zone, a book written by the Baghdad bureau chief of the Washington Post that gives a striking account of the utter failures of the Bush appointed civilian leadership on the ground in Iraq. For those who do not have time to read the book, I just came accross this article from Matt Taibbi of Rollingstone.com that raises exposes (in a somewhat graphic manor) the failures of privatization of the warzone.

As I said before, the article is somewhat graphic in its language, but I recomend that anyone interested in the war read it.

Here is the link followed by the first few paragraphs from the article.

“How is it done? How do you screw the taxpayer for millions, get away with it and then ride off into the sunset with one middle finger extended, the other wrapped around a chilled martini? Ask Earnest O. Robbins — he knows all about being a successful contractor in Iraq.

You start off as a well-connected bureaucrat: in this case, as an Air Force civil engineer, a post from which Robbins was responsible for overseeing 70,000 servicemen and contractors, with an annual budget of $8 billion. You serve with distinction for thirty-four years, becoming such a military all-star that the Air Force frequently sends you to the Hill to testify before Congress — until one day in the summer of 2003, when you retire to take a job as an executive for Parsons, a private construction company looking to do work in Iraq.

Now you can finally move out of your dull government housing on Bolling Air Force Base and get your wife that dream home you’ve been promising her all these years. The place on Park Street in Dunn Loring, Virginia, looks pretty good — four bedrooms, fireplace, garage, 2,900 square feet, a nice starter home in a high-end neighborhood full of spooks, think-tankers and ex-apparatchiks moved on to the nest-egg phase of their faceless careers. On October 20th, 2003, you close the deal for $775,000 and start living that private-sector good life…”

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The Iraq-How Bush’s version of Capitalism lost the war by New School Politics, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.