Can’t Wait Another Minute

Companies awarded $8 billion in contracts to rebuild Iraq and Afghanistan have been major campaign donors to President Bush, and their executives have had important political and military connections, according to a study released Thursday.

The study of more than 70 U.S. companies and individual contractors turned up more than $500,000 in donations to the president’s 2000 campaign, more than they gave collectively to any other politician over the past dozen years.

…

Major contracts for Iraq and Afghanistan were awarded by the Bush administration without competitive bids, because agencies said competition would have taken too much time to meet urgent needs in both countries.

Except, in the case of Iraq, there was no urgent need to start the war in the first place and everybody knows it. If getting rid of the evil Saddam was the predominant reason for the war, as the current spin would have it, then the Iraqi people surely could have held out for a couple of months so that we could follow the law in awarding billions of dollars in contracts. There really was no rush, now was there?

There are a good many reasons why Bush and his think tank intellectual dreamers got us into this thing, from visions of Empire to revenge to breaking OPEC to kicking ass. But, this one really helps explain the ridiculous hurry. The corporations didn’t get their tax cuts in the first term, and if Karl wanted to raise the obscene amount of money it’s going to take to brainwash the public into believing that Lil Cap’n T-Ball isn’t as incompetent as he looks, he had to give these guys a taste.

There was no threat, imminent or otherwise, but we rushed into war destroying every international relationship that stood in our way and coincidentally, had to hand out 8 billion dollars worth of no bid contracts to George W. Bush’s top political contributors — because there was no time to fill out the paperwork.

Sweet.