Through its subsidiary Kellogg, Brown and Root, Halliburton corporation has the government contract for the construction and operation of the detention center for prisoners at Guantanamo Bay and also provides the tents, prefabricated housing and other services for the military bases in Kuwait, Iraq, Afghanistan, Uzbekistan and other areas of the world. Halliburton has subcontracted the specialty work of putting out the oil well fires in Iraq to a good old Texas company called Boots and Coots. Vice-president Dick Cheney was the CEO of Halliburton for five years and still receives a million dollars a year in compensation from the company.

Bechtel corporation is one of those corporations which will rebuild the extensive damage to the buildings and infrastructure of Iraq. Bechtel just happens to be one of the largest contributors to the Republican Party. In the early 1980s Donald Rumsfeld met with Saddam Hussein several times to lobby on behalf of a pipeline for Bechtel from Iraq to Jordan. This was at a time when members of the Reagan administration were good buddies with Saddam Hussein, and he was not the embodiment of all evil, as he is at the present time. Other corporations with intimate connections to the Republican Party and being considered for lucrative government contracts in Iraq are Parsons Corporation and Fluor Corporation.

I'm sure the US corporate media will portray the spoils of war going to some of the corporations with the closest ties to the Republican Party as being mere coincidence. They would rather find some Iraqis who they could pay to stage a demonstration, showing how grateful they are for being bombed, poisoned with depleted uranium and losing loved ones. Now, that they have intimidated all the independent journalists by firing tank shells and missiles at them and killing a few, this shouldn't be too difficult.

American capitalists profit both from the destruction of war and the reconstruction afterwards. All the bombs and missiles that rained down on Iraq will now be replenished at taxpayer expense and great profit to the military industrial complex. Like in Yugoslavia, they can privatize any remaining state-owned corporations and turn them over to American corporations. I remember people saying that the bombing of Yugoslavia was ineffective. Actually, it was very effective. It destroys any corporations which are competitors to American corporations and permits American corporations to then enter and control the industrial capacity of that country. They can also teach these recalcitrant people about the benefits of capitalism. Notice that the US military was selling water to the people in southern Iraq, while they were literally dying of thirst, and the US claimed this was a lesson in "free enterprise."

The next targets for US military intervention will be those countries which have rich natural resources like oil but haven't been penetrated sufficiently by US corporate interests and have leaders who are not yes men for US global hegemony. These countries include Syria, Iran, Libya, Cuba and North Korea. The children of these nations should beware. Cluster bombs and depleted uranium are on the way to "liberate" them from their limbs, their eyesight or their very lives, courtesy of those "brave American heroes" who drop bombs unchallenged from miles high in the atmosphere. Then, there will be even more spoils of war for the rich and powerful to feast upon.