Iraq, Inc.

It took me but a few hours to polish off a book that had much promise and was filled with dense, heavily reported detail, but was ultimately unsatisfying. Iraq, Inc., by Pratap Chatterjee of the anti-business watchdog group CorpWatch, purports to tell the tale of how nobody gained from the Iraq "occupation" except military contractors like Halliburton and Bechtel. (And how, surprise surprise, Dick Cheney ultimately profited/masterminded it all.)

It begins with a bizarre morality tale about Iraqi (or is it Indian/Pakistani) workers' lack of union rights -- so why were these people clamoring for the jobs again? -- and ends up in a dry litany of cost-overruns and inefficiencies.

OK, we get it: Halliburton, etc., engaged in some shady accounting practices. DoD turned a blind eye through a combination of incompetence and cronyism. And after it was all over (or as of the writing of the book), Iraq was still not rebuilt.

Problem is, all the bad stuff this conspiracy theorizing reveals -- and, to be sure, there was some unlawful accounting, as well as harm done by letting the perfect get in the way of the good -- pales in comparison to the policy mistakes detailed in the likes of Cobra II. If Paul Bremer hadn't disbanded the Iraqi army or disqualified all former Baathists from office, for example, would we really be complaining that Halliburton's subsidiary KBR (which still runs the DFACs here) double-billed for meals a couple of times? Or that it serves pork, which is, of course, offensive to Muslim sensibilities? (Actually, the latter I'm not sure we should care about even now.)

No, the book had promise, and some of its charges are perfectly valid, but its shrillness and obvious bias detracts from the point it's trying to make.