[iraqforsale.org is also out there]

[. . .]

"Iraq for Sale": Death on the cost-plus plan

Even if you already know, or think you know, what a massive bonanza the Iraq war has been for private contractors like Halliburton and Blackwater, Robert Greenwald's latest guerrilla-distribution muckraking effort, "Iraq for Sale: The War Profiteers," will disturb you profoundly. Historians may never agree on precisely why the United States went to war in Iraq (the Marxist term "overdetermined" comes to mind), but Greenwald's film suggests that a small cadre of private contractors and consultants with close ties to the Republican Party and the national-security apparatus may have been the war's biggest beneficiaries. (I should acknowledge that "Iraq for Sale" uses images of Abu Ghraib abuses drawn from Salon's published archive of photos, and that Salon reporter Mark Benjamin appears as an interviewee. Salon was not involved in making the film.)

Like most of Greenwald's work, "Iraq for Sale" results from dogged and impressive investigative reporting, and its compassionate presentation of the ordinary American stories at its heart is highly effective. It also feels hastily and cheesily assembled, making its central argument murkier than it wants to be. While I applaud Greenwald's self-devised distribution system -- like his previous documentaries, this will be shown at private parties in homes, schools and churches around the country, and is immediately for sale on DVD -- there's no way around the fact that his audience will be 99 percent composed of people who already agree with him.

Greenwald isn't capable of the magisterial, mournful manner of, say, Eugene Jarecki's "Why We Fight," but the two films would make a natural double bill. Essentially, "Iraq for Sale" depicts a war effort in which virtually everything except the actual killing has been outsourced to private companies whose snuggly relationship to the Bush White House is profoundly anti-competitive and probably corrupt. Security firms like Blackwater and mega-contractors like Halliburton (actually, there is no "like"; Dick Cheney's former company is the only one of its ilk), instead of providing cost savings, have bilked the taxpayers out of billions, provided slipshod service to the troops, and consistently placed their own poorly trained employees in mortal danger.

We meet the grief-stricken families of the Blackwater security contractors who were so infamously killed, desecrated and hung from that bridge in Fallujah in March of 2004; we see a former Halliburton engineer reduced to tears as he says that the company's faulty treatment plants are delivering bathwater loaded with deadly pathogens to U.S. Marines. We learn that many of the Abu Ghraib interrogators were civilian employees of CACI, a private consulting firm, and were not accountable to the military chain of command. Titan, a company contracted to deliver linguists to the military, supposedly hired anybody off the street who could speak either Arabic or Farsi along with a little English. (Some of these "linguists" reportedly could not read or write; hardly any had formal training.)

Halliburton's Iraq contracts operate on a "cost-plus" basis, meaning that whatever the company spends in expenses it gets back, plus a profit margin. This allegedly leads to profligate spending: When an $80,000 truck blows out a tire, the company torches the truck and leaves the burned-out hulk beside the road; it's more profitable to buy a new truck than a new tire. Employees say they were paid to luxuriate at expensive oceanfront resorts in Kuwait and Qatar; again, the profit margins would be higher there than for rooms at Holiday Inn. The current Congress has repeatedly declined to exercise any meaningful oversight over the Pentagon's contracts with these companies, despite the fact that, as one military observer comments in the film, true free-market conservatives should be outraged by the monopoly and cartel behavior on display.

Greenwald offers an amusing comeback to those critics (myself included) who have complained that he never gets responses from the object of his attacks. Over the closing credits, we watch him and his assistants leaving repeated voice-mail messages for executives at Halliburton, Blackwater, CACI and other companies. Greenwald claims his production company made 38 phone calls and sent 31 e-mails requesting interviews or comments from representatives of the companies involved. All declined to participate.

Taken as a whole, "Iraq for Sale" is such a pileup of grim news that viewers may be tempted to throw up their hands in total despair. As "Why We Fight" makes clear, Democratic administrations have been just as involved with militarizing the U.S. economy as Republicans. Still the audience that most needs to see this film is the one least likely to: patriotic working-class and middle-class Americans who trust the president and his party on matters of national security. If Greenwald can sneak this onto the air in place of this week's "Desperate Housewives," we might start to see some changes around here.

[. . .]