Hallibugaboo

Rich Lowry lays out the argument against accusing the Bush administration of shadiness with regard to Halliburton and Iraq (link via Lileks). According to Lowry, Halliburton's subsidiary Brown & Root won a competitive bid for the LOGCAP (LOGistical Civil Augmentation Program) contract in 2001, a multi-year contract to provide material support to the military in whatever capacity required in the event of a military intervention abroad. The same company had previously done work for the military in putting out the Iraqi oil fires after the First Gulf War in 1991.


Knowing that Rich Lowry is an unabashed conservative and supporter of Bush and the War, I determined to snoop a little further. The Army maintains a profoundly ugly web page explaining in bureau-corporo-babble what it is that LOGCAP contractors do (Here it is, and don't say I didn't warn you). I saved the LOGCAP History graph on the page and enlarged it to the point of legibility, and it bears out Lowry's claim: Brown & Root held the contract from 1992-1996, then lost it to DYNCORP, then got it back in 2001. Lowry says that President Clinton awarded B & R a special no-bid contract to work in the Balkans, even though DYNCORP had the contract. I was unable to verify this, but that's because my brain started to smack me between the eyes in an effort to avoid looking at US Army web design any longer.


So Halliburton had the contract during Clinton's first term, and regained it during Bush's. That means they would have continued to have the contract regardless of whether the Iraq War happened. No one's accused Clinton of chumminess with Halliburton or setting its foreign policy to please Halliburton's bottom line. But this is because Clinton's Vice-President wasn't a former head of the company (although Gore's reinventing-government panel did have only good things to say about Halliburton's performance). So what exactly is Cheney's current relationship with Halliburton?


Lowry points out that the Vice-President still recieves deferred compensation from the firm. In trying to figure out what this means, I slummed over to the company's site. I found out that Cheney resigned his position as Chairman and CEO during the summer of 2000 after agreeing to become Bush's running mate. I also found a Washington Post article dated November 6, 2003 and written by Steven Kelman, Clinton's former administrator of the Office of Federal Procurement Policy, stating that the likelihood of a political appointee or official influencing civil service members is next to nil. Kelman goes on to say that accusations of this kind are detrimental to the delivery of cost-efficient goods and services for government needs, and that he was an opponent of the Iraq war.


But that still doesn't define "deferred compensation". A bit of googling has led me to believe that it involves non-salary savings plans, stock options and the like, which makes sense. I doubt Cheney would have left one of the world's biggest oil companies without a parachute of some kind. Whether that means he'll make any actual money out of the Iraq war is more doubtful. After all, according to Kelman, companies rarely profit as much from public contracts as they do from private ones (Halliburton's 3rd quarter profits from Iraq turn out to be a modest 3.7%). And despite all the supposed cronyism, Halliburton's stock price has fluctuated between 30 and 18 dollars per share over the course of the last 52 weeks.