A Small, Cozy World: Bechtel Heads for Iraq

Re “Bechtel Lands Iraq Contract,” April 18: The U.S. Agency for International Development hands out the lucrative contracts for rebuilding Iraq to American companies only.

Your article failed to mention the connection between the USAID administrator, Andrew Natsios, and Bechtel. Natsios was the CEO of the Massachusetts Turnpike Authority, which oversaw Boston’s “Big Dig”; Bechtel’s budget ran billions over on the Big Dig. One hopes that Bechtel won’t run into millions or billions of dollars over budget now, under Natsios’ watch. Did I mention that Natsios was a chairman of the Massachusetts Republican Party for most of the 1980s? It’s a small world between Republicans and the businesses that will profit from the invasion of Iraq.

Libby Breen

Altadena

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In 1983 Donald Rumsfeld, after meeting with Saddam Hussein [as President Reagan’s envoy], sends a then top-secret cable to George P. Shultz, a former president of the Bechtel Corp. but by then the secretary of State in the Reagan administration. Rumsfeld informs Schultz that he has secured a multimillion-dollar deal for Bechtel to build a pipeline to pump oil from Iraq to Jordan.

Twenty years later, Schultz is a member of Bechtel’s board. Rumsfeld, as the secretary of Defense, leads the charge into Iraq under the banner “Operation Iraqi Freedom,” which gets its name after some smart guy at the Pentagon notices that the acronym for the original operational name, “Operation Iraqi Liberation,” is OIL. Our troops move in under orders to immediately secure the oil fields and Ministry of Oil building. Other buildings, even if they contain ancient cultural artifacts, become fair game to looters.

Bechtel is then awarded a $680-million contract to rebuild Iraq, initially to be funded by tax dollars (which of course are funded by the American middle class as, under the Bush administration, billionaires don’t pay taxes) and then by the proceeds from the sale of Iraq’s oil. Hmm.

Ernest A. Canning

Thousand Oaks