High Plains Grifter

The contours of the Bush agenda were established by his transition team. This shadowy group picked the cabinet, outlined the budget, sketched the foreign policy, dreamed up the size of the tax cuts, and scouted across the sprawl of the bureaucracy for opportunities for self-dealing contracts.

None had a sharper nose for scenting opportunities to cash in on federal contracts than Dick Cheney, the man who picked himself as Bush's running mate. Although Cheney flunked out of Yale, he's like Bush in several other ways. He has been arrested twice for drunk driving. And, although he fervently supported the war, he had no desire to actually go to Vietnam and do battle. Saying he "had other priorities," Cheney sought and received two draft deferments. And so it came to pass: others died so that he might prosper. Don't tell Cheney he doesn't understand the meaning of sacrifice.

As a congressman from Wyoming, Cheney established himself as a hard-core right-winger, gnashing away at everything from abortion to Head Start. Poppy Bush picked this top-flight chickenhawk as Defense Secretary in 1989. He managed the first Gulf War, amassing international support through bribery and bullying like a CEO on a consolidation binge, and later rationalized the decision not to depose Saddam or support uprisings by Iraqi and Kurdish rebels, predicting that the fall of the Baathists would destabilize the entire region.

After Clinton steamrolled Bush, Cheney cashed in, landing a top executive position at Halliburton, the Houston-based oil services and military construction giant. Cheney knew all about Halliburton and they knew Dick. In fact, as Defense Secretary, Cheney had devised the privatization scheme which turned over much of the Pentagon's logistical programs (base construction, food and fuel services, infrastructure, mortuaries...) to corporations. He also steered some of the biggest early contracts to Halliburton, including lucrative deals for reconstructing Kuwait's oil fields and logistical support for the doomed venture in Somalia. At Halliburton, Cheney exploited his government and international contacts to boost Halliburton's government-guaranteed loans from $100 million to $1.5 billion in less than 5 years. He also created 35 offshore tax-free subsidiaries, a feat of accounting prestidigitation that would soon be aped by Kenny Boy and the corporate highwaymen at Enron. The grateful board of Halliburton soon rewarded Cheney by making him CEO and compensating him to the tune of $25 million a year in salary and generous stock options. By the time he left Halliburton for the White House, he owned $45 million in the company's stock.

Of course, the question presents itself as to whether Cheney ever really left Halliburton. The company had been bruised a bit under Clinton. In 1997, it lost its multimillion-dollar logistics contract with the Army. Yet, soon after Cheney ascended to the Veep's office, Halliburton seized the contract back and stood poised to become the prime provisioner for the Pentagon as it embarked on operations in Afghanistan, Iraq, Uzbekistan, Qatar, Korea, and the Philippines. Within two short years under Cheney, Halliburton cashed in on $1.7 billion in Pentagon contracts. Then, naturally, Halliburton decided to gouge the government, overcharging for everything from gas deliveries to food services.

Then came the big award: a two-year contract worth $7 billion for rebuilding Iraq's oil infrastructure, bombed to smithereens by the Pentagon. The no-bid contract was awarded by the Army Corps of Engineers, who apparently never even considered another company. No surprise there. Halliburton had drafted the Corps' reconstruction plan for Iraq. "They were the company best positioned to execute the oil field work because of their involvement in the planning," explained Lt. Col. Gene Pawlick, a PR flack for the Army.

All the while, Cheney continues to personally benefit from Halliburton's government contracts. He still holds options for 400,000 shares of Halliburton stock and continues to receive $150,000 a year in deferred compensation from his former company.

Of the 41 members of the Bush transition team, 34 came from the oil industry. The mask has slipped off the beast. Not since the days of Warren Harding has big oil enjoyed a firmer stranglehold on the controls of the federal government. Bush's inner circle is dominated by oil men, starting with Bush and Cheney and including six cabinet members and 28 top political appointees. Recall that Condoleeza Rice has an oil tanker named after her and that Stephen Griles, the number two man at the Interior Department, was the oil industry's top lobbyist and continued to be paid $285,000 a year by his former firm as he handed out oil leases to his former clients. Griles is the Albert Fall of our time. Fall, the architect of the Teapot Dome scandal, where his crony's oil company was quietly handed the rights to drill on federal lands in Wyoming, pronounced: "All natural resources should be made as easy of access as possible to the present generation. Man cannot exhaust the resources of nature and never will." More than 80 years later, this reckless nonsense could serve as a motto for the Bush administration. But see how times have changed: Fall went to jail for his self-dealing; Griles got a bonus.

Then came the neo-cons: Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, Scooter Libby, Douglas Feith, Donald Wurmser, and John Bolton. This coterie of hawks, many of them veterans of Reagan/Bush I, were deeply marinated in the writings of the darkly iconic Leo Strauss and schooled in the art of political terror by Henry "Scoop" Jackson, the senator from Boeing. After eight years on the outside, they came in febrile for war from the get-go and charged with an implacable loyalty to Israel, nation of the apartheid wall and the 82 nukes. The neo-cons' devotion to Israel was so profound that several of them hired themselves out as consultants to the Israeli government.

To complete the starting lineup, Bush and Cheney also dredged up from the obscurity of far right think tanks some of the most malodorous scoundrels of the Iran/Contra era: Elliot Abrams, John Poindexter, Otto Reich, and John Negroponte. Soon enough this merry band of brigands were up to their old tricks. Poindexter, from his den at DARPA, devised a Big Brother program under the name Total Information Awareness, branded with an Illuminati logo, which sought to keep track of the movements and credit card purchases of all Americans. Then Poindexter, who had once been convicted of lying to Congress, opened up a futures market for terrorist attacks, where traders would be financially rewarded by the Pentagon for accurately predicting suicide bombings. Meanwhile, Abrams, another Iran/Contra felon, was put in charge of human rights in the Middle East--a curious brief for the man who backed the butchers of Guatemala and El Salvador. Even Hunter S. Thompson blazing away on blotter acid couldn't dream this stuff up.

Thanks to Paul O'Neill, Bush's former treasury secretary, we know what we'd suspected all along: that the Iraq war was plotted long before Al Qaeda struck New York and Washington. Bush himself came to office seething with vindictive rage like a character in a Jacobean revenge play. After all, he believed that Saddam had tried to kill his daddy in a bungled bomb plot during Bush Sr.'s triumphal entry into Kuwait City in 1993. Here we have one of the colorful features of the new dynastic politics of America: familial retribution as foreign policy.