Global Eye - MASTER CRAFT

[CHIMO]

It's about oil. It's about Israel. It's about democracy. It's about terrorism. It's about global dominance. It's about Bush family dynamics. It's about national security. It's about religion.

Countless theories have been offered to explain the origins of George W. Bush's invasion of Iraq. Some are clearly specious, others have more merit, but all are speculative to some degree. The ultimate truth will doubtless prove elusive. "Reality has always had too many heads," as Bob Dylan wisely reminds us. However, by sticking solely to clearly established, noncontroversial facts, we can perhaps stake out a small patch of clear ground in the sulfurous fog of war. For the facts show that whatever else the Iraqi adventure may be about, at least one thing is certain beyond dispute: It's about money.
Last week saw a flurry of stories (largely ignored, naturally) indicating that the pervasive corruption of America's colonial enterprise has risen to new heights. Reports by scrupulously nonpartisan institutions, including Christian Aid and the General Accounting Office, the independent investigative arm of the U.S. Congress, revealed that in the final weeks of its "formal" occupation of Iraq -- before handing over nominal control of the client state to CIA-backed terrorist leader and ex-Baathist enforcer Iyad Allawi -- the Bush Regime plunged into an orgy of graft that stripped Iraq's treasury bare. Most of this loot was divvied up in no-bid contracts to Regime lardbuckets like Halliburton -- but up to $3 billion of it simply "disappeared" into pockets yet unknown, The Baltimore Sun reports.
Like their Baathist predecessors, the Bushist overlords were given control of the UN-established Development Fund, which was supposed to guarantee that Iraq's oil revenues were spent on the needs of the Iraqi people. But like Saddam Hussein, Bush instead used the fund as a barrel of personal pork to reward cronies and buy local political support with bribes. By the time Bush viceroy Paul Bremer made his hugger-mugger handover of "sovereignty" to CIA man Allawi, there was less than $1 billion left in the $20 billion fund -- with more than $6 billion of this siphoned off in just the last two months of direct U.S. rule, The Guardian reports.
http://context.themoscowtimes.com/stories/2004/07/09/120.html

Abillion here, a billion there, pretty soon we are talking about real money.

[enough]

1. The same operation Hussein ran

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We told you it was sweet: You get control of Iraq's oil money and dish it out to your cronies and collaborators until it's all gone -- while setting aside a few secret billions for yourself that no one can ever trace. It's the same operation that Hussein ran. He's accused of skimming $4.4 billion from the Development Fund while he was in power -- but that took him years. Bush almost matched him in just 14 months. As the Iraqis say of the occupation: "The pupil has gone; the master has arrived."

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