Operation rent seeking: how the war on terrorism became a business model.

• Author: Lofgren, Mike
• Position: Pay Any Price: Greed, Power, and Endless War - Book review

Pay Any Price: Greed, Power, and Endless War

by James Risen

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 304 pp.

In present-day America's politically polarized atmosphere, it is easy to characterize divisive issues like the war on terrorism, the Wall Street bailout, or the Affordable Care Act as symbols of a clash of ideologies. Ideology is present in all of these issues, but it is possible to overrate it as a factor in contemporary policymaking. When I was a congressional staffer, I became acutely aware that elected officials choose issues to put at the top of their agendas mainly for their ability to shake money out of the purses of contributors. The subsequent histrionics in the House or Senate chamber are pure theater for the benefit of C-SPAN and the poor recluses who watch it. Behind every political cause is a racket designed to privatize the profits and socialize the losses.

It is no wonder, then, that James Risen, national security correspondent for the New York Times, has been in legal jeopardy with two presidential administrations of different parties. His new book, Pay Any Price: Greed, Power, and Endless War, is a chronicle of fascinating and heretofore secret stories in America's war on terrorism. The book has a simple and arresting thesis: the longest war in America's history is pure nirvana for the greedy and unscrupulous. Whatever the architects of the war on terrorism thought they were doing, the Iraq War's purpose rapidly evolved within the iron cage of the Washington public-private ecology into a rent-seeking opportunity for contractors and bureaucratic empire building for government employees. Its real, as opposed to ostensible, purpose seems to be endless, low-level war. The rote appeals to patriotism are just another way of mau-mauing critics. With a theme that attacks the underlying bipartisan consensus on terrorism of the last dozen years, it is no wonder the Justice Department once contemplated heaving Risen into federal prison.

The author opens his book with a little-known operation from the Iraq War; it began immediately after the U.S. occupation of that country and continued until the summer of 2004. Air Force C-17 cargo planes transported $20 billion in cash from the vaults of the New York Federal Reserve Bank in East Rutherford, New Jersey, to Baghdad. The ostensible purpose of this cash, much of which had never been formally appropriated by Congress, was to revive the country's shattered public services and pay Iraqi civil servants.

The program was so hideously mismanaged that $11.7 billion of the $20 billion was unaccounted for, disappeared, or was stolen. As one might expect in a Middle East culture of baksheesh, an unknown quantity was pocketed by Iraqi politicians. But another, also undetermined, amount was skimmed by mid-level and junior U.S. military officers in charge of counting and distributing the cash; Risen mentions the cases of some who were caught depositing suspiciously large sums in their bank accounts in the United States.

Unfortunately he says nothing about the senior officers who had extraordinary discretion over much of the cash under the Commander's Emergency Response Program. I recall generals trooping to Capitol Hill throughout the mid-2000s to sing the praises of CERP; the reader can imagine just how popular a...