The first question one could ask when reading the title “Halliburton in Iraq” is “who is Halliburton ?”. Well Halliburton is rather famous amongst US and even world oil companies, so for sure it is a major player in the oil business but its influence transcends this frame. Lets first introduce this corporation shall we : Halliburton Energy Service is a multinational corporation operating in more than one hundred and twenty countries, it was founded in nineteen nineteen (1919) in Houston (Texas, USA) by Mr. Erle Halliburton where it has established its headquarters until adding second headquarters in the city of Dubai (Emirate of Dubai, United Arab Emirates) in March 2007 where Chairman and Chief Executive Officer David J. Lesar is temporarily residing and working given the company’s flourishing business in the Middle-East. Oil well services and equipment being its industrial sector, the company sells technical services to the petroleum industry and operates as well, at a lower level, in the construction business. Its revenue is fifteen point three billion US dollars (Wall Street Journal) and net income is evaluated to three point five billion US dollars. It has a workforce of fifty thousand. The interest of talking about Halliburton is the controversy it sparkles concerning the Iraq War, the place of Vice-President Dick Cheney as a former chief executive officer (CEO) of Halliburton until the 2000 American Presidential Elections during which he retired with a compensation of thirty-four million dollars ! This kind of controversy is not new as the same case was seen during the Vietnam War, concerning this time the ties between former President Lyndon B. Johnson and Halliburton former subsidiary Brown & Root (later renamed Kellogg, Brown & Root, better known as KBR). So when in October two thousand-and-two Halliburton saw its US based oil production slowing down at such extent that it risked bankruptcy as shares value fell from twenty two dollars a year before to twelve point sixty-two (which equals a decrease of nine point thirty-eight dollars !), it decided to diversify its outlets so when the 2003 Iraq War (or Gulf War 2) broke out and the Saddam Hussein Regime fell down in rubble in April 2003, Halliburton’s subsidiary Brown and Root arrived in Iraq with mission to “assessing the condition of oil-related infrastructure, cleaning up oil spills and other environmental damage at oil facilities, engineering design and repair or reconstruction of damaged infrastructure, assisting in making facilities operational, distribution of petroleum products, and assisting the Iraqis in resuming Iraqi oil companies operations.” (quoted from declassified documents of The US Department of Defence or DoD). Moreover, Halliburton, as an operating company in the construction sector, was awarded as well with some juicy reconstruction contracts in Iraqi other than the already mentioned oil-related ones totally equivalent to nearly nine hundred million dollars ! But why, amongst all the oil companies available and more qualified than Halliburton or KBR, did the Army Corps of Engineers in its Logistics Civil Augmentation Program (or LOGCAP) chose specifically this company and its subsidiary for the job ?! Make the link yourself : The White House representing the supreme federal power in the US, and Supreme Commanding of the Armed Forces being included amongst the Federal prerogatives of the White House so control over the Pentagon by extent ; moreover, when you know that Vice-President Dick Cheney was the former Chief Executive Officer of Halliburton Corp. and was an “executive officer” in The White House during the 2003 Iraq War ; so the only option left is that the US Army Corps of Engineers received instructions from the vice-presidency to pick Halliburton, easy as stealing candies from a baby, the candies being the money and the baby being The American People !
