Halliburton is America.

"For almost a century, Halliburton has made an indelible impression on the world."
--from the Halliburton website

"The chief business of the American people is business."
--Calvin Coolidge, 1925

We here at DHAIP issue a demand: the Internet must be stopped! There is simply too much information and all of our eyes have become tired. Here we were, trying to compose a simple little post summarizing the history of Halliburton -- just our way of contributing to the great debate -- and we become swamped with more facts than we can possibly put together and still keep the post at a reasonable length. Brevity is the soul of blog.

We were inspired by the amusing novel Absurdistan by Gary Shteyngart, and its references to Halliburton (or "Golly Burton" as the Absurdi prostitutes are wont to call out to passerby), its subsidiary Kellogg, Brown & Root (KBR), and the mysterious LOGCAP (Logistical Civilian Augmentation Program) contract, which as Mr. Shteyngart suggests, more or less means that the more Golly Burton spends -- even on useless services -- the more it makes. Which would of course help to explain Golly Burton's reticence on certain topics of late.

That reticence, as well as the Executive Branch's lack of concern on the topic, is not entirely new, of course. "Why this huge contract has not been and is not now being adequately audited is beyond me. The potential for waste and profiteering under such a contract is substantial." This statement was made not in 2006, but in 1966, by a young Republican Congressman from Illinois, named Donald Rumsfeld. Obviously we couldn't make up an irony that rich. We haven't the narrative gift. We understand that he later changed his opinions.

The shoe was on the other foot then, of course -- it was a Democratic President and the war was further east. Brown & Root (already owned by Golly since 1962, although Kellogg hadn't come around yet) was known to US soldiers in Vietnam as "Burn & Loot," for their habit of turning a blind eye to supply theft and sloppy bookkeeping. Thus their reputation for quality remains consistent.

Johnson, of course, was a fan too, having had his 1948 Senate run bankrolled by the pre-Golly Brown and Root, which was only fair, because he, as a Congressman in 1937, had in turn helped secure their first major federal contract, the building of the Mansfield Dam. And gosh darn it if he didn't get Brown & Root and Golly a whole lot more of them later on. It's one of the things that helps makes Texas great.

Golly's LOGCAP came around later, of course, in a rather interesting way. Apparently in 1992 the US Secretary of Defense (Richard Cheney) authorized the Pentagon to commission a report from Brown & Root detailing whether or not contractors might be useful to have around in any wars that might happen to come up. They determined that it would. Shortly thereafter they won their LOGCAP.

This caused a problem a few years later, when KBR, after some mysterious pricing issues involved with the Balkan War, lost the LOGCAP contract to Dyncorp, much to the consternation of their CEO (Richard Cheney). Fortunately, in 2001, with a new President (George W. Bush) and Vice President (Richard Cheney) installed, and clearer heads prevailing, they got it back.

All of this is old news, of course. (Some of our sources are visible through the links, and then of course there's our old friend Wikipedia.) But we at DHAIP have always done our best to promote an understanding of history, and we thought a quick romp down memory lane might be fun.

But what is history? (We're always asking things like that.) We follow link to link and find that in 1962, in addition to purchasing B&R, Golly also picked up Dresser Industies, where a young man named George H. W. Bush had worked for three years as an oilfield supply salesman, possibly because his father Prescott Bush was on the Board of Directors. After George left he founded Zapata Petroleum Corporation, who some seem to feel had connections to the Cuban Bay of Pigs Operation at the CIA, which George H. W. Bush later became the director of....

...and then somehow you've made it to the United Fruit Company and Cuba again and IG Farben and God knows what else....

And then bit by bit you realize that the history of the US, and of the World, was never about the presidents and the generals and the pictures in your textbooks -- you realize that it was always Burn & Loot and United Fruit, Golly and gosh, all our principles, all our beliefs, everything we are and have been and will become, it's all just BUSINESS.

How's that for pessimism?

"She looked down a slope, needing to squint for the sunlight, onto a vast sprawl of houses which had grown up all together, like a well-tended crop, from the dull brown earth; and she thought of the time she'd opened a transistor radio to replace a battery and seen her first printed circuit. The ordered swirl of houses and streets, from this high angle, sprang at her now with the same unexpected, astonishing clarity that the circuit had... there were to both outward patterns a hieroglyphic sense of concealed meaning..."
--The Crying of Lot 49, Thomas Pynchon