truthdig.com

The 50-year Iraq war—bring it on. Not that the media or the Democrats made much of it, but the White House’s admission that President Bush is modeling America’s presence in Iraq upon the 54-year-old stationing of U.S. troops in South Korea is as outlandish as it is alarming. Outlandish, when the president of what is still presumably a representative democracy willfully ignores voters’ demands that the occupation be brought to a timely end; alarming, because Bush has clearly not understood that it is the U.S. occupation that feeds the nationalist and religious frenzy roiling Iraq, and the entire Middle East...

truthdig.com

"As the Iraq war that Vice President Dick Cheney created continues to shred American - and many more Iraqi - lives, further documentation has emerged proving that, even during failed wars, the merchants of death profit. No company has profited more from the carnage in Iraq than Halliburton, which Cheney headed before choosing himself as Bush's running mate. One shudders at the blissful arrogance of this modern Daddy Warbucks, who sees no conflict of interest over the blood-soaked profits garnered by the once-bankrupt division of the company that left him rich.

This week's evidence of the continuing corruption of Halliburton and its subsidiaries profiteering from contracts costing American taxpayers an unbelievable $22 billion stems from a report by the special inspector general for Iraq reconstruction. The report, only one of many about Halliburton's recently severed subsidiary KBR, focuses on work done in Baghdad's super-secure Green Zone. While parent company Halliburton insults U.S. taxpayers by relocating its headquarters to the tax shelter of Dubai, subsidiary KBR has been spun off to focus more directly on the American military contracts that form the core of its operations..."