Blood Money: Wasted Billions, Lost Lives, and Corporate Greed in Iraq (Hardcover)

~ (Author)
Key Phrases: special inspector general, private security contractors, logistics contract, United States, Army Corps, Custer Battles (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Miller's collection of riveting, disheartening narratives chronicle the spendthrift methods of the coalition behind the Iraq invasion, featuring so many spurious entrepreneurs, opportunistic politicians and greedy contractors that it almost requires a pen and paper to keep track of them all. Beginning with the war itself, Miller demonstrates how the high hopes and genuine passion of those in the front lines paved the way for corruption, fraud and criminal negligence. Miller cites countless improbable, self-serving schemes, including Alaska Senator Ted Stevens's plan to get Iraq's cellular phone network built by Eskimos; the high-end children's hospital proposed and built by Bush family friends at the expense of Iraq's already-existing and badly in-need health facilities; and the work of Halliburton, whose unprecedented involvement makes for disturbing revelations: "From reveille to lights out, the American military depended on Halliburton for its existence." Miller's telling examples, covering everything from water and electricity restoration to security, health care and oil production, are at once depressing and compelling, and one gets the sense that Miller could've gone on ad infinitum relating unfinished and tarnished projects. Though Miller jumps from one sector of Iraq's infrastructure to another and shows little concern for chronology, the coalition's effort itself is too disorganized and the avaricious characters too plentiful to permit Miller to concoct a more unified and linear narrative. Despite this, Miller's important account fascinates throughout with the breadth and depth of the ongoing debacle.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From The Washington Post

When future historians sift through the wreckage of the Bush administration's Iraq policy, they will rely in large part on a handful of books by brilliant reporters who watched the debacle unfold. George Packer's The Assassins' Gate is one such book, and Thomas E. Ricks's Fiasco is certain to be another. To this short list of indispensable accounts detailing how what was supposed to be a liberation became a quagmire, I would now add T. Christian Miller's Blood Money.

Most accounts have focused on the political and military mistakes made in invading and occupying Iraq. These errors have become somewhat familiar: the failure to plan for an occupation, even a short-term one; the U.S. proconsul L. Paul Bremer's careless destruction of all that remained of order in Iraq -- the Baath Party and the army -- in one fell swoop; and above all, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's persistent refusal to acknowledge that an Iraqi insurgency was growing and to raise U.S. troop levels accordingly.

Miller, an investigative reporter for the Los Angeles Times, fills in the missing piece: the staggering incompetence and corruption of the U.S.-led reconstruction effort, which may have done almost as much as anything else to turn the Iraqi population against its occupiers. Despite headlines in recent years about Halliburton's hefty revenues, this has been, in general, the less-covered dimension of the Iraq adventure. At its heart, Blood Money is the tale of how Washington left a country desperately in need of rebuilding to the whims of money-hungry private contractors, and of how the lack of clear lines of authority doomed efficiency, effectiveness and accountability from the start.

The result? "In almost every way the rebuilding has fallen short," Miller writes, despite some successes, such as the reconstruction of thousands of Iraqi schools and the vaccination of tens of thousands of Iraqi children. "After three years Iraqis have less power in their homes than under Saddam. Hospital neonatal units lose electricity, and doctors watch children die . . . . Oil production is far below its prewar peak. Poor Iraqis in Baghdad slums suffer through outbreaks of easily preventable diseases like hepatitis for lack of clean water or health care." And what bothers him most now, he says, is that the Bush administration seems about to give up on the reconstruction, slashing its funding even as it extends the U.S. troop presence in Iraq.

How did the country that authored the Marshall Plan botch Iraq? By way of explanation, Miller brings to life the villains and heroes of the often arcane reconstruction effort. His villains include politically connected contractors such as Mike Battles and Scott Custer, whom the former inspector general of the U.S. Army's Fifth Corps calls "rip-off artists" and who, Miller reports, never endured "any serious effort" from the Bush administration to recover the taxpayer dollars they were responsible for; senators such as Ted Stevens (R-Alaska), who, Miller writes, inserted language into the $18.4-billion Iraq-reconstruction bill of November 2003 guaranteeing "special contracting privileges for a group of constituents [the Alaska Native Corporations] that supplied Stevens . . . with votes" ; Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) administrator Bremer, whom Miller accuses of simply not paying attention while such depredations were happening under his nose; and even Laura Bush, who championed an extravagant showcase hospital on the outskirts of Basra that Miller reports drained money and attention away from the small-scale health clinics that Iraqis really needed.

Miller's heroes are the ordinary soldiers and administrators who went to Iraq with the best intentions and tried desperately to make life better for the Iraqis -- and almost always failed. Some, Miller writes, such as Army Lt. Col. Ted Westhusing, a security trainer assigned to oversee one suspect U.S. contractor, may have been driven to suicide because of it. None of these stories is more engrossing -- and as full of the high drama that only true-life villainy and heroism can supply -- than Miller's account of the outrageous tale of Jack Shaw, a senior Pentagon official who brazenly interfered with the creation of Iraq's mobile-phone network. Miller writes that even though contracts had already been handed out, Shaw, a deputy undersecretary of defense described as someone who "could have been a caricature of the Beltway insider," sought to benefit a company linked to a friend of his. According to a November 2003 e-mail from Shaw that Miller cites, the Pentagon official tried to use a new contract for a police mobile network as a "back door" for his friend's company to set up its own commercial cellphone network. Then, Miller adds, Shaw used Sen. Stevens's legal loophole, intended to award Iraq contracts to "native Alaskans" on a no-bid basis, to sneak in his favored consortium.

When a brave and honest CPA official, Daniel Sudnick, tried to blow the whistle, Miller reports that Shaw spread stories around the Pentagon suggesting that Sudnick was corrupt, resulting in the latter's being forced to resign. Shaw's actions were finally exposed, but because of the confusion he created, it took more than two years before a police mobile-phone network was installed in Iraq. "During that time thousands of American soldiers and Iraqi police officers were killed, at least some of whom could have been saved had they been able to pick up a phone and call for help," Miller notes. Shaw was finally fired in December 2004, but Miller reports that -- in keeping with the Bush administration's unblemished record of never holding a senior official responsible for any lapse of judgment -- his departure was not explained and he was never held accountable.

Miller also tells the inspiring story of Shaw's mirror opposite, Stuart Bowen, the inspector general for Iraq reconstruction, who, despite his own insider GOP connections, turned into an indefatigable investigator and truth-teller. And the book provides the best account yet of the pitfalls of contracting security out to private companies. Miller obtained documents from the Army Corps of Engineers that show that "private security contractors played a leading role in the daily violence of Iraq" but never faced the penalties served up to, say, the military abusers at Abu Ghraib prison. Often acting without any coordination with U.S. forces, Miller writes, contractors would fire at Iraqi cars even when they hadn't been obviously provoked. This arbitrary treatment enraged Iraqis, especially since the contractors were effectively immune from criminal or civil charges.

Miller doesn't always give us the full picture: His chapter on Iraq's electricity problem, probably the single biggest setback to reconstruction, seems like an afterthought. It is also hard not to feel sympathy for contractors who worked in horrific conditions: About 500 of them have lost their lives in Iraq. But one of the many virtues of Miller's book is its balance. Halliburton, for example, comes off better than you might expect: The firm almost unfailingly supplied the promised services to troops (as anyone who has eaten at one of its subsidiary Kellogg Brown & Root's well-stocked dining facilities can attest) even as it gouged taxpayers for oil profits. "The company delivered, but wasted a lot of money doing it," Miller says. That, sadly, is more than one can say about the rest of the reconstruction effort, which for the most part didn't deliver at all.

Reviewed by Michael Hirsh
Copyright 2006, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 352 pages
• Publisher: Little, Brown and Company; annotated edition edition (August 29, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0316166278
• ISBN-13: 978-0316166270
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.1 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (19 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #538,472 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

39 of 40 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Shocking, Read with "Squandered Victory", September 8, 2006

By	Robert D. Steele (Oakton, VA United States) - See all my reviews (TOP 50 REVIEWER)

Amazon Verified Purchase

This is a definite five star piece of work that approaches our failures in Iraq from a different perspective, and hence should be read with, Squandered Victory: The American Occupation and the Bungled Effort to Bring Democracy to Iraq. It goes beyond Squandered Victory, which creates outrage over incompetence, and actually turns one's stomach with disgust toward the end.

The book starts with a very useful timeline of events, and the opening premise that Paul Wolfowitz was wrong on virtually every promise and claim made to Congress.

The author's strategic view, threaded throughout the book, is that the U.S. effort in Iraq never had coherent "supreme commander" type leadership, that virtually all elements (U.S. Army and U.S. Marines excepted) lacked both intelligence and integrity, and that this was one of the most incompetent, ignorant occupations in the history of mankind. He does seem to avoid pointing out that Rumsfeld demanded complete military control of the country, relegated the diplomats to the back room, and did not even tell Bremer for a year that there was a diplomatic plan for nation-building. This is on Rumsfeld and Bremer. History will judge them harshly.

The author documents that the US Government knew in advance that there was no plan for the peace (the State Department efforts not-withstanding) and no way of creating an effective plan.

The author is powerful in showing that "shock and awe" warfare made the transition to peace virtually impossible. 17 out of 21 Ministry headquarters buildings were completely destroyed (and then the occupying force allowed for the looting of all offices, all museums, all universities, and all stockpiles of ammunition and explosives needed for the Improvised Explosive Devices (IED) that have killed so many of our troops. The oil infrastructure was not protected, was completely looted, and this lost the chance for paying anything with oil in the early years.

Immortal quote on page 40: "...a circus, a Looney Tunes version of government, hatched on the fly, delivered at random, and operating without instruction."

Reconstruction cost estimate: $2.4 billion. Actual cost: $30 billion and rising. Results after several years: less than 10% of the needed work. Money unaccounted for: $18 billion.

The author differs from those who supported sanctions in pointing out that the sanctions virtually destroyed Iraq's health system.

Psychologically, the author suggests that the months of lip service to freedom and reconstruction raised hopes that were then dashed. One is reminded of the Davies J-Curve from the 1970's--revolutions occur not among the oppressed, but among those who have been shown the prospect of freedom and prosperity, and then had it taken out of their grasp.

On contracting, one's stomach turns with every page. Cost plus, no incentive to save; U.S. companies doing for millions what Iraqi companies would do for tens of thousands; U.S. contractors earning $60K and more, foreign laborers imported for $3000 a year. The author specifically quotes contractors as saying they knew they could steal the process blind in the first year, which would be "open season."

I consider this book to be the eventual final nail in the coffin of the Private Military Contractors. The author documents how the military's very unwise reliance on private contractors for combat zone logistics led to a need for private contractors to provide security, to the point that 22% of the reconstruction dollars are going toward Private Military Corporations (PMC).

My global reading program suggests that the Bush-Cheney Administration will go down in history as having pulled off the most blatant program of planned lies to the public, Congress, and the United Nations, and the most blatant slight of hand in switching the burden from a properly staffed military command to a war-profiteering mélange of PMCs. There is no question in my mind but that we need to eliminate PMCs along with Transnational Organized Crime (TOC) in the future, and we need to properly fund four forces after next: big war force, small war and gendarme force, peace force, and homeland security force. The US military today is a Cadillac built for the superhighway, when we need 10 jeeps, 100 motorcycles, and 1000 bicycles.

The author condemns both the U.S. Government in all its parts, and the PMCs in all their parts, for issuing frantic and confused orders and never really getting their act together. This book is the obituary for Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, and Paul Bremmer, among others.

EDIT of 10 Dec 07: Since then war crimes of contractors have become an issue, see Licensed to Kill: Hired Guns in the War on Terror and varied media stories.

38 of 39 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Bigger Mess than John Q. Public Thought, September 3, 2006

By	Wantz Upon A Time Reviews "www.wantzuponatime... (Chicago) - See all my reviews

Halliburton is only the tip of the proverbial iceberg. Have you ever heard of Nuor, Bechtel, or SYColeman? They are merely chunks off an icy flotilla of the government's favored contractors.

Daily news reports are filled with hints of the abuse of taxpayer dollars. In Blood Money, Miller spells it out in sickening detail. The very people who the American public have entrusted to "take care of business" are doing just that, and lining their own pockets in the process. No project, or life, is too big next to pockets of green.

The Iraqi reconstruction process is plagued with poor planning, poor implementation, and misguided funding. Contractors are put in the line of fire in order to repair or rebuild infrastructure, and much of it falls apart after they leave due to the lack of training and/or necessary tools to keep it going. In some cases, the "reconstruction" efforts may have lasting negative effects on Iraqi citizens.

Especially alarming is the possibility that botched repairs of a water infusion plant by a highly-paid American contracting group may be contributing to permanent damage to Iraqi oil fields. In the desert, the lack of ground water affects the pressure needed to allow oil to seep up from the ground, and the infusion plant does just that: infuses water into the ground to increase that pressure. Making matters worse are the broken pipelines that cause oil backups at working wells, forcing well workers to pump it back into the ground.

Then there are the "expendable" third-world workers and blue-collar truck drivers brought in by some contractors to fill job orders - only to be mowed down by insurgent fire.

The examples of political and corporate abuse are so abundant that even reading a few chapters will enrage people who oppose the war and worry supporters. It is clear that the Iraqis need reconstruction help, but there needs to be more accountability.

T. Christian Miller is the kind of investigative reporter who promises to walk in the shoes of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein. His tireless efforts and thorough sourcing are to be highly commended, as it takes a brave person to speak up against the powerful people he takes on in this book.

Future journalism--and ethics--classes will do well to add this sad chapter to their lessons.

Reviewed by Christina Wantz Fixemer
9/3/2006

14 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Death before being dishonored., October 9, 2006

By	R. A. Barricklow "Scaramouche" (Las Vegas NV USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

An important and imperative work. Investigative journalisim at its best under trying circumstances. American at its core, in that it gets a tough and dirty job done. Not with the help of government, but despite it. In this Reagan era of privitizaton/trust the market place, we have a choice: trust Bush or the dollar. How could you lose? The book opens and closes with Col. Ted Westhusing, the definition of his alma mater, WEST POINT: DUTY, HONOR, COUNTRY. Third in his class, plus a doctor of philosophy, and an exemplary record of war/peace service. Yet he met his nemesis: Iraq. For in Iraq he found a war of privitization that had nothing what so ever to do with DUTY, HONOR, or COUNTRY. It was simply about the money, or at best, cronyism. Whether it was murder or suicide, his last communication was in writing and I paraphrase, " I cannot support a mission that leads to corruption, human rights abuse and liars. No more. I cannot support corrupt, money hungry contractors, nor work for commanders only intersested in themselves. I came to serve honorably and I feel dishonored. Why serve when you cannot accomplish the mission, when you no longer believe in the cause, when your every effort and breath is met with lies, lack of support and selfishness. Life needs trust". So what comes around goes around. When a government is "elected" that produces Iraqs and Katrinas then you get the government you deserve. Col. Ted Westhusing desevered better. We, the citizenry could count on him. But in the end, he could not count on us. This book needs to be read and passed on by word of mouth. I wouln't count on the privitized mainstream press. I think there are about a total of four papers left that still have a investigative journalism department. After all, it is all about the bottom line. The Money. Highly recommended!!!!!