The Profiteers by Sally Denton

Author:Sally Denton
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

The Hydra-Headed American Giant

“Bechtel arrived in Iraq quietly,” wrote Dahr Jamail, among the relatively few unembedded journalists to report from occupied Iraq during the war and its aftermath. “Before Iraqi military resistance around Baghdad melted away in the face of the U.S. military onslaught, before a single armored vehicle rolled across the Iraq-Kuwait border, while the Pentagon polished war plans, and while America was engaged in an ostensible national debate on the very question of bringing war to Iraq, the Bechtel Corporation of San Francisco was already poised to take a leading role in the reconstruction of a presumptive postwar Iraq.”

On April 17, 2003, USAID, under the direction of Andrew Natsios, awarded Bechtel an eighteen-month contract worth up to $680 million. Less than six months later, the agency raised the contract’s ceiling to $1.03 billion for the massive reconstruction project. L. Paul “Jerry” Bremer III, a dapper patrician, and onetime manager of Henry Kissinger’s international consulting business, assumed the position of top administrator of the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA). An “amateurish and vainglorious viceroy,” as New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd portrayed him, Bremer oversaw the US body that managed the projects by American contractors and administered postwar Iraq. One journalist described the CPA as a “policy engine for a wholesale privatization of Iraq’s state-owned entities.”

The terms of the USAID contract called for Bechtel to repair the water infrastructure in ten urban areas within the first month and to restore the potable water supply in forty-five urban centers throughout Iraq within a year. “Bechtel has positioned itself very well to transition its operations into a full-blown privatization of water services,” according to one report. “The company’s contract could easily be extended from the reconstruction of water and wastewater systems to include the ‘distribution of water,’ just as Halliburton’s was for oil.” A former CIA senior political analyst writing in the New York Times warned that America could alter the destiny of the Middle East for decades, “not solely by controlling Iraq’s oil, but by controlling its water.”

Bechtel’s representatives in Iraq were giddy at the company’s good fortune in helping to create a new nation-state. Iraq “has two rivers, it’s fertile, it’s sitting on an ocean of oil,” an ebullient Cliff Mumm, the head of Bechtel’s Iraq operation, said in pointing out the strategic value of the country. “Iraq ought to be a major player in the world. And we want to be working for them long term.” Installed at the contemporary Kuwait Sheraton, some fifty Bechtel engineers and managers, dressed in Bechtel-logoed golf shirts and no-press khakis, summoned dozens of British and American businessmen seeking the coveted subcontracts doled out by Bechtel. Experts estimated that 70 percent of the billions of Iraqi contract money would be paid out to subcontractors selected by Bechtel. The “hydra-headed American giant,” as the New York Times described Bechtel, was the unmistakable keeper of the “golden keys.”

In a Hyatt hotel ballroom in Jordan, Bechtel executives made a presentation to a thousand aspiring subcontractors. Appealing

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