Kovco a victim of a privatised war machine

The debacle over the return of Private Jacob Kovco is an ironic consequence of Howard’s willingness to participate in President Bush’s privatised military adventure in Iraq and symbolises all that is wrong with it. Tagging along with the ‘George knows Best’ approach to the Iraq war has come back to bite Howard in the backside. It is having more political impact than the rest of the Iraq war and AWB combined. Howard even used the ‘S’ word for the first time in his Prime Ministership – that’s a measure of how serious the government regards the potential impact of this fiasco.

A little history, courtesy of Crikey and Wikipedia sources, is required to set the scene for this farce. Every non-military function of the US occupation of Iraq, from reconstruction, supply of fuel and catering, to the repatriation of casualties, has been outsourced to private companies, usually without tendering, and usually to a handful of companies (such as Halliburton) with close connection to the Bush family and the Bush administration. Who says war isn’t profitable?

The Howard government is laying the blame for the Kovco bungle on Kenyon International who are contracted to repatriate deceased US military personnel. Kenyon is a subsidiary of SCI (Service Corporation International), the world’s largest funeral home corporation based in Texas, whose chairman Robert Waltrip is a long time friend and campaign contributor to the Bush family.

In the late 1990s, SCI was involved in a ‘grave recycling’ scandal called ‘Funeralgate’, when thousands of bodies were improperly and fraudulently disposed of in mass graves in violation of US State and Federal laws. In 1999, Bush was subpoenaed but refused to testify in a lawsuit filed against the state of Texas and SCI by Eliza May, former director of the Texas Funeral Service Commission. May claimed that she was fired when she refused to quit investigating SCI despite pressure from Bush and his then Chief of Staff Joe Allbaugh.

Harry Whittington, the current chairman of the Texas Funeral Service Commission, was appointed by then-Texas Governor George W. Bush. Readers might remember Whittington as the lawyer who was shot in the face by Vice President Dick Cheney (former CEO of Halliburton) in a hunting accident.

Joe Allbaugh was later appointed by Bush as head of FEMA, despite having no expertise or experience in disaster management, and subsequently was widely condemned for his mismanagement of the Hurricane Katrina disaster response. Not surprisingly, SCI won the no-bid contract for collecting and counting the casualties of Hurricane Katrina and has been accused of mishandling bodies and conspiring to block media coverage of the actual number of deaths from Katrina.

Truth is stranger than fiction. Leaving aside the merits or otherwise of privatising war, the consequences of the cronyism and nepotism of the Bush administration will haunt the world for years to come. Howard eagerly bought into the great Bush adventure in Iraq, and now the chickens of Bush’s anticompetitive outsourcing have come home to roost in Howard’s hen house.

If it weren’t for the tragedy of the loss of Private Kovco, the thousands of US casualties, the tens of thousands of Iraqi casualties, and the bungled evacuation of New Orleans and the un-necessary additional loss of life New Orleans, this farce would be rich with poetic justice worthy of the great Bard himself.