The Bidness of This Nation is Bidness

So saith Calvin Coolidge. It's one of the few things Silent Cal ever said, and the only thing he said that's widely remembered.

As the editor Lewis Lapham points out in this month's Harper's (September '06 -- sorry, there's no link; Lapham's stuff doesn't generally appear on line), Operation Iraqi Freedom isn't going very well. Baghdad looks like a smudge pot and a bloody smear, and when our troops come out of their bunkers and holes they get blown apart with I.E.D.'s.

But if you look at it as a business proposition, the Iraq War is a roaring success. Lapham cites the figures: Halliburton is $12.3 billion richer thanks to the war, Parsons Corp. has raked in $5.3 billion, Fluor Corp. has made $3.7 billion, and Bechtel is better off to the tune of $2.8 billion.

Freedom and democracy are on the march.

Likewise, stock prices for firms contributing to our idealistic effort to spread the blessings of democracy and free-market capitalism to the primitive backwaters of fatwas and sharia have risen as well in the last three years. Lockheed-Martin is up from $52 per share to $75, and Boeing stock has gone from $33 to $77 in the same period. Here again, Halliburton is the big winner, having gone from $22/share three years ago to $74 now, although Fluor Corp. is competitive with a run-up from $34 to $87.

Obviously, war is great business. I'd strongly suggest you invest your kids.

Which reminds me, if your kids don't feel like going as underpaid, overextended National Guard recruits, they can always apply to one of the private companies that has about 50,000 personnel in Iraq right now, making up to $150K a year for driving trucks and serving as "discreet travel companions" (English translation -- "bodyguards") for the various field-grade officers and corporate middle-managers unlucky enough to be in country.

It looks as if we've returned to the age when knighthood was in flower, and war was a for-profit business engaged in by professionals. This continued during the Renaissance, when a professional captain of mercenary soldiers wrote, "Our manner of life in Italiy is well known -- it is to rob, plunder, and murder those who resist."

At which point we do well to ask, what exactly has Iraq gotten from Halliburton et. al. for all those billions? Electricity? Sewers? Schools? Hospitals? Security? Or just the opportunity to maybe, if you're lucky, survive one more day?

Geoff Chaucer knew about this "chivalry" business. He'd been there, in the 100 Years' War. The protagonist in his "Knight's Tale" is more likely to rob a church and sodomize a nun on any given day than he is to protect any poor innocent person.

And even though I haven't been to Iraq, I've seen it on t.v., and I know all about GW Bush's "democracy" business.

And it is a business, conveniently located offshore. It would be way too messy if that money was being made here.