The price is right: bomb-resistant trashcans, cultural diversity training, and other tools to rebuild Iraq.

• Author: Singh, Jai
• Position: 10 Miles Square

At first glance, the war profiteers looked more like Rotarians. When I walked into the Sheraton National Hotel, just a stone's throw from the Pentagon, the posh lobby was packed with dozens of nondescript, amiable, middle-aged men, most of them slapping someone on the back, exchanging business cards, or chatting enthusiastically on a cell phone. "Look, just ask them to tell us what they're lookin' to pay," one business-suited man barked into his phone. Another man with a Southern accent, talked about a client, potential partner, or hire. "I wanna say he went to Chile, but it might have been one of those other counties." Another guy, lounging near the bar, recalled the hotel before its recent multi-billion dollar renovation. If he knew it had improved so much, he told me, he would have brought the kids.

Like me, they were here to attend a 2-day conference on "Rebuilding Iraq." In the months since Congress allocated more than $18 billion in U.S. taxpayer dollars for reconstruction projects in the newly-liberated country, the Baghdad-based Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) has been taking bids on everything from mobile hydraulic cranes to amberlite resins to Iraqi army uniforms. The conference organizers, New Fields Exhibitions, Inc., had promised a "one-stop-shop for success in Iraq." And if the scene in the lobby didn't exactly conjure up images of instability and violence, the products being pitched certainly did.

One stack of brochures on the registration table advertised bomb-resistant trashcans, each available in colors ranging from windswept copper to lapis blue, and capable of containing the explosion of a pipe bomb. (I had already missed the demonstration, held one day earlier). Another company specialized in refitting sport utility vehicles with armor plate and bulletproof glass, making them invulnerable to small arms fire. The Overseas Private Investment Corporation had set out information packets about its political insurance policies, aimed at those firms worried about having their assets expropriated by the future Iraqi government. The delivery-services company DHL, a major sponsor of "Rebuilding Iraq," didn't have much traffic at their table. I asked their representative about the DHL plane that got shot down just a few weeks prior to the conference. "It was an old plane anyway," he said.

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