To the corporate victors go the spoils of Iraq contracts.

THE collective insanity of the Bush administration is enabled by a posse of self-interested yes-men ready to swear on their mothers' graves that the moon is indeed made of green cheese. Whatever the delusion du jour is, be it a messianic sense of righteous purpose, an obsession with "tax relief" or thirst for oil, one prime mover is always close to the heart of the fanatics' purpose: the corporate bottom line.

The dots leading from Wall Street to the West Wing situation room are easy to connect. There's money to be made in postwar Iraq. Even before the first smart bomb was dropped on Baghdad, we already had a winner in Iraq. The conquering heroes were not generals in fatigues but CEOs in suits.

The United Nations has traditionally overseen the reconstruction of war zones such as Afghanistan or Kosovo. But in keeping with its unilateral, the-world-is-our-sandbox approach to the invasion, the White House decided to nail a "Made in the USA" sign on this Iraqi fixer-upper.

The Bush administration doled out over $1.7 billion in government contracts to American companies that lined up to cash in on the rebuilding of postwar Iraq before the destruction had even begun. Talk about advance planning: Even while the people of Iraq were girding themselves for the thousands of bombs expected to rain down on them during the first 24 hours of the attack, the administration was already picking and choosing who would be given the lucrative job of cleaning up the rubble.

'Urgent circumstances'

To further expedite matters, the war-powers-that-be invoked "urgent circumstances" clauses that allowed them to subvert the requisite competitive bidding process and invite only a select group of companies to bid on the rebuilding projects.

So just which companies were given first crack at the post-Saddam spoils? The top bidders--Bechtel Group, Fluor Corp. and of course Vice President Cheney's old cronies at Halliburton--had donated a combined $2.8 million over the past two election cycles, 68 percent of which went to Republicans.

A total of $8 billion in contracts, according to the Center for Public Integrity, has been doled out to 70 American companies that have made political contributions totaling nearly $50 million since 1990. More than half a million dollars went to Bush's presidential campaigns, surpassing the amount collected by any other politician in the past 12 years.

No one in the administration embodies this bottom-line mentality more than Dick Cheney. The vice president is one of those ideological purists who never let little things like logic, morality or mass murder interfere with the single-minded pursuit of profitability. His on-again, off-again relationship with the Butcher of Baghdad is a textbook example of what modern moralists condemn as "situational ethics," a convenient code that allows you to do what you want when you want and still feel good about it in the morning. In the Cheney White House (let's call it what it is), anything that can be rationalized is right.

Cheney and Hussein were clearly on the outs back during the first Gulf War, when Cheney was Secretary of Defense and the first President Bush dubbed Saddam "Hitler revisited." Then Cheney waltzed over to the private sector, and suddenly things between him and Saddam warmed up considerably. With Cheney in the CEO's seat, Halliburton, through its foreign subsidiaries, helped Iraq reconstruct its war-torn oil industry with $73 million worth of equipment and services--becoming Baghdad's biggest such supplier. (When, during the 2000 campaign, Cheney was asked about his company's Iraqi escapades, he flat-out denied them.)

Open-ended contract

Cheney's former cronies at Halliburton proved nothing if not flexible. They were at the head of the line of companies ready to reap the estimated $7 billion it will take to modernize Iraq's oil infrastructure. This of course comes on top of many other lucrative Pentagon contracts, including a 10-year deal to provide food services to the Army that comes with no lid on potential costs.

In an act of good faith, the Army Corps of Engineers awarded Halliburton an open-ended contract to make emergency oil infrastructure repairs and fight oil fires as soon as the war started. This burn-and-build approach to business guarantees that there will be a market for Halliburton's services as long as it has a friend in high places to periodically carpet bomb a country or two.

Clearly, our national interest runs a distant second when pitted against the rapacious desires of special interests and the politicians they buy with massive campaign contributions. Oil and gas companies donated $26.7 million to Bush and his fellow Republicans during the 2000 election and almost $20 million in 2002.

Thankfully, one aspect of Halliburton's Iraq rip-off came to glaring light last fall: oil price gouging. Under the terms of its sweetheart deal with the Department of Defense, in addition to repairing the country's tattered oil infrastructure, Halliburton, through its subsidiary Kellogg Brown & Root, is also obligated to provide U.S. forces with gasoline for their operations. This gasoline is procured in Kuwait, where it sells for roughly 70 cents per gallon. By the time it arrives in Iraq, the gas sells for approximately $1.70 per gallon.

The profit margin is unconscionable in a time of war. During World War II, Franklin Roosevelt took the extraordinary step of levying heavy penalties against companies that sought to exploit the war. "I don't want to see a single war millionaire created in the United States as a result of this world disaster," he declared. Clearly his spirit doesn't live on in the current White House.

>From the book "Fanatics and Fools: The 2Game Plan for Winning Back America" by Arianna Huffington, published by Miramax Books, copyright 2004 by Arianna Huffington. All rights reserved. Reprinted with permission of Miramax Books. Distributed by Tribune Media Services Inc.