In the second quarter of this year, Halliburton, famed for its involvement in no-bid contracts in Iraq, posted income from continuing operations of $391 million. Its subsidiary, the Pentagon’s largest private contractor in Iraq, Kellog Brown and Root (KBR), posted income of $122 million.
Last year, the per capita income in Iraq was $77. That’s right, seventy-seven dollars. And that was down from $137 in 2003. Of course, there’s a war going on and bombs blowing up and buildings no longer in existence and water that causes disease and minimal electricity and that all plays a role.
What also plays a role though is who gets hired in Iraq for work in Iraq, particularly in the reconstruction efforts.
The Iraq Relief and Reconstruction Fund, approved by Congress in 2003, totaled $18.4 billion. Many of the reconstruction contracts were awarded to American companies. Many of those companies pulled in employees and sub-contractors from every place but Iraq.
KBR had 24,000 employees and subcontractors in Iraq last year. It primarily hired South Asians, South American, Europeans, and Americans.
Bechtel, another U.S. corporation with years of experience feeding US troops in the Gulf, employed 1,800 Pakistanis, Indians, Bangladeshis and Nepalese in its kitchens, in 2003; it also employed a few dozen Iraqis to help with the cleaning.
Even a United Nations team, assisting the Iraqi Electoral Commission, trained thousands of poll watchers and thousands of election registrars, yet it hired only 600 Iraqis.
In total, there are only 87,500 Iraqi employees associated with the reconstruction efforts, led by the Iraqi Contract and Project Office, formerly known as the Coalition Provisional Authority, according to a March 2005 Congressional Report.
All this, even though the U.S. government’s “Business Guide for Iraq” suggests that “prime contractors and subcontractors are expected to partner with Iraqi firms at every opportunity.”
Nevertheless, the fact remains that American companies are profiting while the unemployment rate in Iraq is between 25 and 50 percent and young people are offered a few hundred dollars to deposit bombs amongst the landscape and people.
Perhaps, as Mr. Frederick Barton, senior advisor of the International Security Program at Center for Strategic and International Studies testified last week at the Senate Foreign Relations Committee Hearings, “we need to put the Iraqi people first...[and] give them a direct stake” in their future.
Written in conjunction with Jennifer Hicks.