Profiteering in a Time of War

Matt Miller exposes the unseemly profiteering and politics going on right now while our military men and women are fighting in Iraq.

We're supposed to be bound together as a nation in an important cause. Yet every day brings fresh news of cozy profiteering.

Halliburton, the vice president's former firm, has been awarded the first multimillion-dollar contract to rebuild Iraq. Richard Perle, one of the intellectual architects of our Iraq strategy, stands to make $725,000 from Global Crossing if his chums at the Pentagon OK a big deal.

None of this may be illegal. I'm even prepared to hear someone make the case that these deals shouldn't concern us. But not everything that is legal is right. And if that's true in peacetime, how much truer should it be now? If there's nothing unseemly about these arrangements, I'd like to hear the President himself defend them.

But the most surreal disconnect between Washington values and American values remains the President's tax cut. The Senate has now voted to slice the President's $700 billion-plus tax cut in half. A triumph of fiscal sanity, we're told. If this view becomes accepted, it will only prove how corrupt our standards of public judgment have become. [emphasis added]

The Senate's cut of the proposed tax cut was not the act of political courage some suggest. When facing $400 billion annual deficits, a $350 billion tax cut is also unsustainable.

Using the war to justify any tax cut, moreover, is simply outrageous.