Anti-Climacus

LINK: Hitch goes at it again:

"At any rate, a burning well is a tough proposition and an uncapped well—permitting a wholesale discharge—an even tougher one. The situation was being handled by Boots and Coots, a fire-control company with an almost parodically American name, which is based in Houston. Boots and Coots, which also worked in Kurdistan and Kuwait after the much worse conflagrations of 1991, is subcontracted for the task by Kellogg, Brown, and Root (another name Harold Pinter might have coined for an American oil company), which is in turn a subdivision of Halliburton. And "Halliburton," which admittedly sounds more British and toney than Boots and Coots, was once headed by—cue mood music of sinister corporate skyscraper as the camera pans up in the pretitle sequence—Vice President Dick Cheney.

Well, if that doesn't give away the true motive for the war, I don't know what does. But unless the anti-war forces believe Saddam's fires should be allowed to burn out of control indefinitely, they must presumably have an idea of which outfit should have got the contract instead of Boots and Coots. I think we can be sure that the contract would not have gone to some windmill-power concern run by Naomi Klein or the anti-Starbucks Seattle coalition, in the hope of just blowing out the flames or of extinguishing them with Buddhist mantras."