Pay Any Price: Greed, Power, and Endless War by James Risen BOOK REVIEW FIVE STARS

 

BOOK REVIEW - FIVE STARS

Pay Any Price: Greed, Power, and Endless War by James Risen

Author James Risen took the courageous step to open a disgusting chapter in America's loathsome and disgraceful trip to the bottom of a cesspool.

A must read expose that reaffirms that the public can be sold anything...even a war.

EXCERPTS.

They have largely avoided the scrutiny and infamy that dragged down the post-9/11 operators who garnered too much attention, like Erik Prince, the founder of Blackwater. The new quiet oligarchs just keep making money.

They are the beneficiaries of one of the largest transfers of wealth from public to private hands in American history.

Iraq and Afghanistan, American soldiers actually on the payroll of the U.S. Army were outnumbered by independent contractors working for private companies hired to provide services from meals to base security. From Pakistan to Yemen to Somalia, American counterterror operations have relied heavily on outside contractors to provide intelligence and logistics. As a result, the tenets of twenty-first-century American capitalism have become the bywords of twenty-first-century American combat. That includes the most infamous catch phrase of the global financial crisis—“too big to fail.”

They had to be bailed out by the government, no matter how execrable their past behavior or how badly they had been mismanaged. Letting them fail, refusing to bail them out, would only sink the American economy.

KBR was the company that allowed America to go to war without a draft. The United States did not have to send tens of thousands of soldiers to Iraq or Afghanistan to perform the traditional supply and rear echelon work of an army, like building bases, cooking food, or finding clean water. KBR contractors did all of that instead. Napoleon famously said that an army travels on its stomach. Well, then, the American army traveled on KBR. It was the company that made it possible to prosecute wars of choice. It was so big and so influential—so necessary to the Iraq enterprise—that KBR was repeatedly able to survive controversies and investigations and a lengthy series of allegations of wrongdoing in its operations in Iraq. (Its standing as a central player in the war on terror even survived a bribery scandal that ultimately led to a former KBR chief executive being jailed for his part in a plot to bribe Nigerian officials.)

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