More than one year after the fall of Baghdad, the reconstruction of Iraq
was failing terribly. Ordinary Iraqis waited in line for basic
necessities like clean water and fuel, while the number of civilians and
soldiers killed escalated in tandem with the billions of U.S. tax
dollars spent. In Iraq, Inc.: A Profitable Occupation, Pratap Chatterjee
delivers an on-the-ground account of the occupation business, exposing
private contractors as the only winners in this war.
Chatterjee examines the big failings and even bigger swindles of Iraq's
corporate managers, from the dangerous follies of an out-of-touch
government-in-exile to the unchecked price gouging by Cheney's
successors at Halliburton. In Iraq, Inc. Chatterjee contrasts the
employment boom of mercenaries--more than 20,000 soldiers of fortune
from apartheid-era South Africa, Pinochet's Chile, and elsewhere in
Iraq--with the crowds of unemployed locals ripe for recruitment to the
resistance.
Drawing on years of research and first-hand experience in the region
including his live reporting from post-invasion Iraq as he traveled
around the country first in December 2003 when Saddam Hussein was
captured and in April 2004 during the height of the siege of Fallujah,
Chatterjee brings us the dilapidated hospitals, looted ministries, and
guarded corporate enclaves that mark the plunderous road to America's
free Iraq.
