ARMY, INC.(The Talk of the Town)

Publication: The New Yorker

Publication Date: 12-JAN-04

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COPYRIGHT 2004 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.

If there were an annual prize for the world's most despised company, Halliburton would have been the runaway favorite in 2003. It was the designated villain for those who believe that the United States went to war for oil. Its connection to Vice-President Dick Cheney, who ran the company between 1995 and 2000, inspired cries of cronyism when it won the contract to repair Iraq's oil fields without submitting a bid. And its subsidiary Kellogg Brown & Root, or K.B.R., was recently labelled a war "profiteer," after Pentagon auditors accused it of overcharging the government on a contract to supply oil to the Iraqi people. (Last week, the Pentagon took away that contract.)

The conspiracy theories and corruption claims make for great headlines, but they miss the point. There's little evidence of chicanery in the...

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