(05-30-2011 06:09 PM)RobertN Wrote: (05-30-2011 03:12 PM)Raider_ATO Wrote: (05-30-2011 02:41 PM)RobertN Wrote: Obviously Fox "News" didn't mention the overcharging by Haliburton.
I'm glad they chose to go with another contractor then. waitaminute....
You guys seriously don't remember all the stories about Haliburton being fined for overcharging the government?
Btw, no I can't give you companies that could do it better or cheaper. Just because I can't doesn't mean that there aren't. I am sure there are plenty just in your friggin state whatever that state may be. I am not about to look up a list of large contractors who can do the job.
I'll save you the trouble of looking it up.
There are four companies that might be able to handle it - Halliburton, Bechtel, Fluor, and Schlumberger. Schlumberger is French. Bechtel and Fluor have historically been the republicans' go-to companies and Halliburton has historically been the democrats' go-to company, as in Vietnam under LBJ. LBJ and George Brown (the "B" in KBR, the Halliburton subsidiary doing the lion's share in Iraq) were long-time drinking buddies. There are those who will say that Halliburton got tired of seeing work go to Fluor and Bechtel under republican administrations and brought Cheney in to get a connection to the republicans. If that's true, it obviously worked.
You'll notice the word "might" in the lead sentence of the previous paragraph. It's not at all certain that anybody but Halliburton/KBR could manage a project of this size.
For the record, and I've said this on here many times before, what I think SHOULD have happened is what Biden said--Iraq should really be split into three countries--1) an independent Kurdistan in the north that could stand alone, 2) a predominantly Shi'a country in the Tigris and Euphrates valleys, that could keep the name Iraq and would be oil-wealthy but would need outside help (US? NATO? UN?) to keep order and to prevent a fight between Iran and Saudi, and 3) the predominantly Sunni western provinces, which probably could not stand alone (no oil) and would therefore most logically be folded into Saudi Arabia. The problem with doing this is that Turkey opposes an independent Kurdistan. Why is this relevant to this discussion? Because the Turks want EU membership more than anything else, so you tell the French that Schlumberger gets the contract to handle Kurdistan if the French can convince the Turks, and the French tell Turkey that Kurdistan is the price of EU membership. This is the kind of thing you can do when you work through diplomacy instead of going it alone.
Let Schlumberger have the contract for Kurdistan, let Bechtel or Flour spilt the Shi'a area and the other the Sunni area, and let Halliburton have overall responsibility. That would have cost more than the way we did it, because there are considerable advantages of scale in this kind of operation, but it would have faded some of the political heat.
Most of the "overcharges" have resulted because auditors have applied 20/20 hindsight to decisions that had to be made in a split second for life/death reasons. Is it reasonable to hold someone to the same standard for a split-second decision as for a decision made with the benefit of six months of hindsight? I think not. You may disagree.