Another Cost of Iraq
by Jim Washburn
Within days I'll doubtless be back to complaining about what a moribund lump the LA Times has become, but there was an excellent piece of reportage by T. Christian Miller and Doug Smith in Friday's Times. Headlined "Forgotten Warriors, Injured civilians battle to get care," it tells about some of the hidden costs, in money and lives, of Bush and Cheney's significantly privatized wars. Much of the work the military did in-house in previous wars was outsourced to private businesses. Over 1,400 civilian adjuncts died in Iraq and Afghanistan without every being tallied in the wars' death toll. Another 31,000 have been wounded or hurt.
I recommend reading the article. In brief, it tells how many of the civilian contractors who've returned from Iraq just as blown up and broken as the uniformed troops get run through the ringer for sometimes years by the insurance companies that should be seeing to their needs. Is this a familiar name: AIG? Under contract with firms doing business in the two war zones--including that other sullied acronym, KBR--AIG was the biggest commanding player in that field. They and smaller firms took in some $1.5 billion in premiums, while the estimate of what they're paying out is $900 million. That's $600 million in pure corporate profit tacked on to the cost of the wars for the insurance alone, a fraction of what the main contractors were making.
To protect their profits, AIG and other companies have, the article explains, vigorously fought paying major disability-and even death-claims, forcing claimants to go to court, where many of them literally didn't have a leg to stand on, because they left it in Iraq.
Next time your friends are having a teabag party and bitching about bailouts, ask them how they feel about enriching AIG and others by $600 million off the suffering of others.
How did things get so screwed up? Dick Cheney. Back when he was Secretary of Defense, he commissioned a study to make the case that many of the military's services could be less-expensively handled by the free enterprise system. Then, whoppdedoo, out the revolving door to private life, where as the new head of Halliburton (of which KBR was a spin-off) he cashed in on that study, winning huge contracts for the firm; then, whoosh, back in the door, where the administration he pretty much bossed handed gigantic contracts to Halliburton/KBR, and we learned that "free enterprise" means no-bid contracts with huge cost-plus profits built in, so that literally the more money the contractor wasted the more profit they earned. Some got richer, some got maimed: there was something for everyone in Bush's America!
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