Tuesday, August 18, 2009

Iraq War’s Winners and Losers

by Sherwood Ross | Consortiumnews.com, Aug 17, 2009

Editor’s Note: Except for some die-hard neocons, it’s widely recognized that the Iraq War has been a debacle for the United States – paid for in unnecessary loss of Iraqi and American lives, international opprobrium, and the diversion of an astronomical sum of money from domestic priorities to warfare.

However, some military contractors have done quite nicely, thanks; so too have many oil companies, even as the ancillary costs of the $1 trillion-plus war continue to ripple through a devastated U.S. economy, as writer Sherwood Ross describes in this guest essay:

“On my last day in Iraq,” veteran McClatchy News correspondent Leila Fadel wrote August 9, “as on my first day in Iraq, I couldn’t see what the United States and its allies had accomplished. … I couldn’t understand what thousands of American soldiers had died for and why hundreds of thousands of Iraqis had been killed.”

Quite a few oil company CEO’s and “defense” industry executives, however, do have a pretty good idea why that war is being fought. As Michael Cherkasky, president of Kroll Inc., said a year after the Iraq invasion boosted his security firm’s profits 231 percent: “It’s the Gold Rush.”

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