03/19/09 – Pratap Chatterjee – The Scott Horton Show

For Antiwar.com, I'm Scott Horton.
This is Antiwar Radio.
I'd like to introduce today's first guest.
His name is Pratap Chatterjee.
He is the head of CorpWatch.org, which is an extremely useful site.
He's the author of a book called Halliburton's Army, how a well-connected Texas oil company revolutionized the way America makes war.
He's the managing editor of CorpWatch.
He has a new article at TomDispatch.com and at Antiwar.com slash Englehart, an article that he wrote with Tom Englehart called Unknown Afghanistan.
Maybe we'll get to talk about Afghanistan a little bit toward the end of the interview.
First of all, I'd like to welcome you to the show.
Pratap, how are you?
I'm fine, thank you.
Thank you for having me on.
Am I pronouncing your name right?
It's not pronounced right.
It's spelled, which makes it a little complicated.
It's pronounced Pro-Tap.
That's the last name is Chatterjee, but yeah, sorry about that.
Pro-Tap.
Yeah.
Okay.
Well, I'll try to say it right.
Forgive me if I continue to get it wrong, which is probable.
That's cool.
Okay.
Well, welcome to the show.
I'm very happy to have you here.
And I know you're familiar, even though you weren't hanging on through that whole speech, I'm sure you're familiar with the war party propaganda that was featured in George Bush's Cincinnati speech in October of 2002.
And I guess, well, I want to go ahead and ask you the bigger picture question first, I guess.
What was this war about?
Why did the Bush administration decide so early?
When did they decide that they needed to have a regime change in Iraq?
And why were they so intent on scaring the American people into letting them do it?
I think my opinion is a little different from a lot of people's.
But before I get to exactly why they went to war, let me tell you about the planning for it.
Because I think that's actually quite important to understand that this goes back many years.
This is not something that was planned in October of 2002.
In fact, right after September 11th, there are a couple of books written by Washington Post reporters, which make clear references to the fact that within 12 hours of September 11th, the attacks on the Twin Towers in New York and on the Pentagon, Iraq was on the table.
So September 11th, 2001.
And of course, as you know, Afghanistan was invaded in October and the Taliban ousted by November.
But by January of 2002, they were setting up.
And this is actually, I'm a big fan of a magazine called Army Logistician.
And I read a lot of military publications.
And they explained when they were getting ready to set up a potential war.
Now, of course, the military prepares for lots of contingencies.
Don't read too much into this.
But they were setting up in Kuwait in January of 2002.
So long before the Cincinnati speech.
And they realized that the current base that they had, which was near the port, was not going to actually be big enough to handle the influx of soldiers if they were going to go to war with Iraq.
And in particular, also because to get there, you had to drive through town, plugged up Kuwait.
So they decided to build a brand new base.
And by September of 2002, so again, a month before Bush made his speech, Halliburton and its subsidiary, Kellogg Brown and Ruth, were already in the desert building these new bases, particularly a camp called Camp Arifjan.
But there were a bunch of the other ones, Camp New York, Camp, you know, all these other places.
And there's still a few left.
Camp Buring are still left in the desert.
But there were, you know, quite a few camps that were built in the desert to accommodate hundreds of thousands of troops that they were expecting to send in to Iraq.
Now, it didn't happen until March 2003.
But when the KBR people hit the ground at the beginning of September, the first bribes that we've tracked were before the October speech in Cincinnati.
They were in September of 2002.
So this is, this is something that is the way the military army logistician article is actually titled, a pre-positioned war, to use a military term.
They were preparing for the war long before the actual invasion happened.
And now they made a lot of fatal mistakes.
They prepared for the war, but they never prepared for what was going to happen afterward.
And so they ran into a lot of trouble because of, you know, bad decisions, incompetence, et cetera, where they had, you know, they dismissed the army and then the army turned, the Iraqi army came back to basically bite them in the backside, so to speak, because they had no jobs and they still had their weapons.
So in terms of war planning, a very bad strategy.
Why did they go to war?
Now, that's the bigger question.
A lot of people say they went to war for oil.
I don't actually think that's true.
And I'll tell you why.
Because Iraq had always sold the U.S., even during the time of sanctions, a lot of its oil.
They sold to, under the U.N. oil for food program, the oil was sold to the United Nations and then sold on to the U.S.
It was, it was limited, the amount they could sell.
But they still, Iraq made a lot of money out of the United States, and the United States had access to that oil.
Now, there's also talk of how the French companies and the Russian companies, you know, were winning these contracts.
I don't think it's quite as blatant as that.
I think they wanted to make sure.
I really think this was an ideological war, in my opinion.
So Afghanistan, Iraq, they wanted to wage this war on what they saw as, you know, this hotbed of evil, of Islamic, you know, fundamentalism, et cetera.
And in their mind, Saddam Hussein and Osama would join at the hip.
Now, I think most people who've worked in the region will tell you that's quite untrue.
But as far as they were concerned, it didn't really matter.
I mean, these are not people who, you know, have very sophisticated world views at all.
So this ideological war was, they were going to bring democracy, American style, by taking all these countries and showing them how it could be done.
And how it could be done meant, you know, introducing capitalism, sending in Republicans who would show them how to have free markets.
Now, as we've discovered in the last year, free markets don't work.
Free markets work to enrich people at the top.
And for a while, people might think you're doing really well.
But this is exactly what happened in Iraq, too.
Now, it so happened that it's taken, you know, 20 years for the U.S. to collapse.
But in Iraq, in a state-planned economy where most people are employed by the government, they couldn't introduce these reforms overnight.
And there's a really excellent book that I recommend that people should read called Imperial Life in the Emerald City by Rajiv Chandrasekharan from the Washington Post, in which he tells us about three men who were in charge of privatizing interstate industries.
And so they sit down with a group of German planners, and they say, hey, how did you guys privatize the East German state?
And some guys are like, okay, how many people you got?
They're like, well, us right here.
And they're like, no, no, we mean like how many actual people you got to go over the books and figure out which are the sick industries, which are the healthy industries.
And they're like, us right here, the three of us.
And these guys are like, you're kidding.
They're like, we need 6,000 people to work for like three years, whatever the number was, in that order to be able to do this.
You can't privatize and turn things over and expect them, you know, to go from bureaucracy to capitalism overnight.
Will capitalism ever work?
I personally think that there are ways of making private sector enterprises accountable.
However, the Bush administration didn't really care about, you know, business management or any such thing.
They just said, you know, we're defeating those bad Muslim terrorists, and Republican, you know, capitalism is going to stop it.
End of story.
And, of course, everything came unstuck.
Did they try to steal the oil?
In fact, Halburton did a very bad job of fixing the oil fields.
In fact, the oil fields are now worse off than they were under Saddam Hussein because they actually screwed up, and I talk about this partly in my book, the repair of the oil fields.
Now, Halburton is one of the world's leading oil companies in terms of oil field services.
They're the ones that invented most of this technology.
But complete, bad, incompetent planning, ideologically driven, and, you know, And, of course, you open yourself up to people.
People see you dishing out money like it's going out of style, and people who are honest, you know, suddenly realize.
Well, one of the examples, and this isn't really specific to Halburton or KBF, one of the examples I'd like to use is this guy, an American, actually, whose name is Robert Stein.
Stein was from, I think, North Carolina, South Carolina, I think, and he had been convicted of petty fraud, credit card fraud.
He'd been fined by the courts, hadn't paid up all his fines, and then he applied for a job with a small Native American company, tribal company out in Montana called Salish and Kootenai Enterprises, and he applied for a job as a supervisor.
They didn't do a lot of background checking.
They had the contract to send, you know, 10% of the people who were going to govern Iraq over, and they were like, okay, supervisor, fine, get over that.
So he gets there into this province called Hillah, and once he gets to Hillah, people realize that they don't have enough people to go around.
They look at his, whatever, his job description says supervisor.
They're like, okay, you're a supervisor?
Supervise the money.
They gave him $82 million to take charge of.
I mean, it was like Christmas for him.
He was like, this is great.
He calls up a friend in Romania called Philip Bloom, another American, and he says, hey, let's set up a couple of companies.
So he set up companies, and then Philip Bloom, his buddy, applied to him for contracts, and he awarded the contracts for 495,006 contracts in like three days.
Guess what the ceiling of his approval ceiling was?
Well, it was $500,000.
So these guys, they bought a Lexus.
They bought a Cessna plane.
They bought 18 gold watches, machine guns, and grenade launchers, had them shipped to him.
He even paid off his fines in South Carolina.
So these guys just went to town.
Now, here's the most fascinating part of the story.
The reason he was stealing all this money was Iraqi money, and he knew nobody was going to check up on it because, you know, the accountants don't check up on Iraqi money that the U.S. had control of.
At the same time, he got another contract, same place, to build, to help rebuild a police station, and that was U.S. government money.
Now, you can't take U.S. government money and spend it, you know, like there's no tomorrow.
He actually has to fill out paperwork.
And here's the best part of the fact that this man, money who, you know, stole the money, he actually even set up a house with women in it to provide sexual favors to soldiers who were helping him.
This man actually did a halfway decent job.
He actually fixed the police station.
It wasn't perfect, but it was a decent job.
Why?
Because there was oversight and accountability.
Because in order to get money, he had to provide receipts to show he'd actually built stuff, you know, and that sort of thing.
So this is kind of a story of why things went so badly wrong in Iraq.
Again, I want to also stress that this is not just the Republican Party.
Most of the rules under which these contracts were given out were designed under something called reinventing government that was started by Al Gore, the man who created the procurement rules that allowed them to, you know, give away the shop to Halliburton, KBR, Bechtel, Parsons, Floor, you know, the laundry list of companies, was a man by the name of Steve Kelman, a professor at Harvard.
He drew up these rules.
These rules are Clinton-Gore era rules.
The first contract to hire Halliburton, KBR in a war zone was before Dick Cheney was vice president.
It was the year before in Bosnia by Clinton.
So I want to note, and you're seeing some of this today with Obama, you know, actually continuing to hire Blackwater, continuing to employ KBR.
This is very much a bipartisan effort.
It is very much, you know, the multi-industrial government complex, as Eisenhower originally termed it, and it is very much a bureaucratic pentagon that wants to be able to, you know, to fight big wars and, you know, spend all these, you know, tax dollars on military equipment.
So basically the whole thing is just a matter of the Republicans dipping their hand in the U.S. Treasury and launching an imperial war of aggression.
You call that free market capitalism?
I don't get it.
I definitely call it free market capitalism, but I also would point out that the way, I mean, capitalism can only work if you have oversight and accountability.
If you say, here's the money, do what you want, you know, charge what you want.
People are going to charge the maximum they can, and they will squeeze poor people, and if they are not asked to provide invoices or be accountable for their actions, they're going to steal the money.
Yeah, but doesn't it matter who's doing the paying, whether it's politicians giving out no-bid government contracts of U.S. taxpayer dollars versus someone spending money in a free market?
It sounds to me like what you're describing is the old British imperial system of mercantilism, the East India Company.
That is a very good point, because let's say if we were in, I'm standing right outside a supermarket right now, and a supermarket, if you were to, you know, the person who runs the supermarket, you know, hires workers, he doesn't tell the workers, hey, just help yourself to whatever money you want from the till.
No, he says, this is your salary, and he says, well, actually, this is a cooperative market, but let's just assume it was owned by, you know, a capitalist enterprise.
He would say, this is your salary, or she would say, this is your salary, and this is how much we'll pay for carrots and beef and, you know, detergent, and this is what we're going to charge consumers.
Right, but see, all I'm saying is the system that you're talking about is a system of fascism.
It's a system of corporatism, where the state and the private profit are combined together at war, and that's not the same as Adam Smith.
Yeah, it is not.
You're right.
In fact, I take back what I said about capitalism.
This is, I mean, in a, you don't, I mean, But wait a minute, wait, wait, wait, I don't want to argue about that anymore.
Let's fight together on the same side against what the Republicans did to get us into this war.
And the Democrats.
They lied, well, and the Democrats, too, of course, but the lies that they came up with about how they knew for a fact that Iraq had all these weapons of mass destruction, that they had storehouses full of sarin and VX and mustard gas, they had an advanced nuclear weapons program reconstituting nuclear weapons, aluminum tubes and African uranium.
In your mind, is this an unprecedented series of lies used to get Americans into this war?
Well, so two things, one, to prove in case anybody thinks maybe we just haven't found them.
I want to cite somebody who's very much a ex-government official, somebody who works for the corporate state.
And so, of course, you've all heard of Scott Ritter probably, who has said, you know, as a U.N. inspector, you know, as a former Republican, I tell you there were no weapons of mass destruction.
Now, but I want to introduce somebody else.
His name is David Kaye, and he works for a CIA contractor called STIC in San Diego, Science Applications International Corporation.
Scott Ritter left before the invasion.
David Kaye, personally appointed by the Republicans, you know, worked for, you know, a major CIA contractor and a government official, a private contractor, made a ton of money.
After two years of the Iraq study group, he came back and said there are no weapons.
This is not a lefty.
This is not somebody who's converted.
This is somebody who's paid to be there, whose job it was to find them, because if he could find a whisper, then he was probably going to get a bonus.
And he came back and said, no weapons, sorry.
There was nothing there.
Now, why did that happen?
I think partly because you had people like Dick Cheney running sort of an alternative intelligence system, you know, where they believe whatever conspiracy they want.
I mean, these guys are conspiracy theorists.
I think these people believe a lot of things.
I mean, I think they're dangerous lunatics more than, you know, necessarily Machiavellian devils who are out there to screw the American people and the Iraqi people.
I think they're nutcases in some cases.
And so they don't understand what intelligence is about.
They think it's about secrets.
They think it's about, you know, about plots.
I mean, a lot of what this dirty tricks the CIA have done, I wouldn't call it intelligent, it's pretty stupid.
I mean, it's called intelligence, but half the time it's not about cleverness.
It's about, you know, how to, it's not about learning what's happening.
It's about how to provide, you know, to defeat other people and force them to listen to your ideological point of view.
So these people were determined to go to war and they discarded any reality check.
So, you know, a lot of stuff that normally the CIA or the National Security Council has said, wait a second, we've got to check this.
They didn't care.
I mean, there's an excellent article by Seymour Hersh talking about stove piping where basically the people at the top took information, raw intelligence, you know, and the thing is, you know, as a journalist, I get people calling me crazy people, clever people, you know, and some of the stuff I listen to and I'm like, okay, well, that doesn't make sense.
Let me go check it out, right?
And before I publish something, it's my responsibility to find out whether or not it's true and not just quote something that somebody called me up about.
Well, these people like Dick Cheney, forget about being journalists.
Forget about being intelligence people.
They weren't even journalists, you know.
They just took things because they wanted to go to war.
This is, in my opinion, and I know that some people say, well, this is about oral, this is about robbing the American taxpayer.
I think these were ideologically driven like lunatics.
Well, and there was also the role played by the Israeli and Iranian governments.
It seemed like they were two pretty big beneficiaries of the war, these two governments, and as Robert Dreyfus and Julian Borger and James Bamford and others reported, Ariel Sharon actually had fake intelligence being produced in English in the prime minister's office in Israel and funneled straight through this stove pipe.
At the same time, they're working with Ahmed Chalabi, who is passing secrets to the Iranians and apparently being used by them, according to the DIA and the CIA, to help lie us into war to get rid of their nemesis, Saddam Hussein.
You know, I'm not as familiar with this.
I have heard of the Chalabi story, and I followed his career because it's pretty interesting.
I didn't know anything about the Ariel Sharon thing, and it's very likely that that's true.
So Al-Qaeda won, and Israel won, and Iran won, and the people of Iraq and the American people have lost.
I definitely think the Al-Qaeda won.
I mean, they were able to recruit so many people.
For them, this was the biggest boon to their...
I mean, September 11th was the way they were able to recruit people.
The invasion of Iraq doubled that victory for them, absolutely.
There's far more terrorism today.
There's far more attacks on people because of the bushfires in Iraq.
Now, Ahmed Chalabi, I won't speak about Ariel Sharon just because I don't know anything about it.
I have never heard this, and I'm sure it's true.
I just don't know anything, so I can't really comment on it.
But Ahmed Chalabi is an example of a crooked, wannabe politician.
Well, I guess he is a politician who is completely self-serving.
I mean, he took to the Iraqi National Congress over $100 million, I think, in money to create an opposition to Saddam Hussein, most of which he spent on himself and his cronies.
When he went to Iraq and he realized the Americans weren't going to appoint him president, which he thought he would be, he basically wanted to enrich himself, and he particularly wanted to be able to appoint himself to high political positions and that sort of thing.
So he turned to the Iranians.
He didn't really care.
He would turn to al-Qaeda, I'm sure, at some point.
I don't know that he has.
I don't think he has.
But all he wanted – Ahmed Chalabi worked for Ahmed Chalabi.
He doesn't actually work for the Iranians or the Israelis or the Americans.
He just works for himself so he can promote himself.
And he's a very bad – I mean, not all self-serving people are completely useless.
But he served really nobody's benefit.
And to me it was astonishing that eventually the Americans started to send in people from Dainkor and Blackwater to raid his house and place him under house arrest because the man was lying.
And some of the stuff he did anybody should have known.
He was in the Iraqi National Congress – maybe not him personally – was sponsoring this group out of, I think, Boston to broadcast an Arabic radio broadcast in which they had these people making fun of Saddam Hussein's moustache.
Well, I mean, that shows you how incompetent they are.
Most Iraqi men have moustaches like Saddam Hussein's.
To make fun of someone's moustache is not going to endear you to the Iraqi population because they're not going to think – That's interesting.
Actually, my friend Mike in Tokyo Rogers wrote an article right after the invasion began pointing out that all the Japanese soldiers who didn't fight in a war role but in a supporting role, they were there, and they all grew moustaches immediately.
They were all under orders to grow moustaches because that's how to try to fit into the culture.
I'm sorry.
We actually are all out of time.
I've got to get my next guest on the phone here.
I really appreciate your time on the show today.
I hope that I can have you back.
We can talk about Iraq.
I want to read your book about Halliburton.
We can talk all about Corpwatch.
I'd also like to interview you about your trip to Afghanistan that you've written this great article about as well.
Absolutely.
Maybe we can arrange to do that in the near future here.
Thank you so much, Scott.
By the way, one more footnote here.
When you talk about the start of the war early, Tim Goodrich from the Iraq Veterans Against the War, he worked on an aircraft carrier helping arm the bombs for the escalation of the no-fly zone bombings in the summer of 2002, almost nine, ten months before the war started.
They had escalated the no-fly zone bombings far beyond anything they had been doing in the 90s.
That's part of your war started early thing there.
Anyway, I'm sorry.
I've got to let you go, but hopefully we'll talk soon.
Thanks so much, Scott.
Okay.
Thank you.
Bye.
All right, folks.
That's Protap Chatterjee, and he is the managing director of Corpwatch.org, which is indispensable.
By the way, I highly recommend it for your bookmarks there.
The recent article he wrote with Tom Englehart is called Unknown Afghanistan.
It's at TomDispatch.com and at AntiWar.com slash Englehart.
And we'll be right back after this.