Is Rand Paul right that Cheney invaded Iraq for Halliburton Profits?

[unhappycamper]

http://www.juancole.com/2014/04/invaded-halliburton-profits.html

Is Rand Paul right that Cheney invaded Iraq for Halliburton Profits?
By Juan Cole | Apr. 8, 2014

David Corn at Mother Jones got the scoop: In 2009, Rand Paul gave a talk at Western Kentucky University in which he accused former vice president Dick Cheney of having gotten up the Iraq War to rescue his troubled oil services company, Halliburton, which– along with its subsidiaries– was awarded enormous no-bid contracts for work in post-invasion Iraq. Corn published the video at Mother Jones.

In it, Rand warned of the Military-Industrial Complex: “”We need to be fearful of companies that get so big that they can actually be directing policy… When the Iraq War started, Halliburton got a billion-dollar no-bid contract. Some of the stuff has been so shoddy and so sloppy that our soldiers are over there dying in the shower from electrocution. I mean, it shouldn’t be sloppy work; it shouldn’t be bad procurement process. But it really shouldn’t be that these people are so powerful that they direct even policy.”

~snip~

Libertarians like Rand often hold that corporations are inherently good and efficient, but are corrupted by the state, which plays favorites and disrupts the market’s magic hand for the purposes of private power. In this philosophy, a corporation would never go to war, but governments routinely do so, and drag corporations into these conflicts with distorting effects. (This premise is patently false– look at the East India Company’s freebooting conquest of India in the late 18th and early 19th century, with which the British state took decades to catch up). Paul’s family has an unusual take on libertarianism, emphasizing states’ rights and limited but still fairly extensive Federal government, though with a relatively isolationist approach to foreign policy. (Rand Paul the father argues against the US defending Taiwan from Communist China, e.g.)

But Paul seemed to make the Marxist argument in this quote, saying that the problem was that Halliburton got too big. (It actually was a relatively small corporation and wouldn’t have been important if Cheney hadn’t become its CEO). He seems to say that Halliburton misused the government for its purposes rather than arguing that the government corrupted Halliburton.

[libodem]

1. HELL YES

You know he's right!

[bemildred]

2. Is The Pope Catholic? nt

[libodem]

3. .

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