The arms contractors LIKE the Iraq war, and the possibility of an Iranian one too!

Booman gives us a heads up on how well Lockheed is doing. (That means you and I have Lockheed's hand in our pockets.)

Richard Cummings has an article in Playboy entitled Lockheed Stock and Two Smoking Barrels. The piece examines the rotating door between Lockheed Martin, the Pentagon, the White House, K Street, and Congressional staff. It also looks at the results: bigger military budgets, huge profits for Lockheed, and permawar. It's a good read, despite being horribly edited (Playboy, are you hiring?). There is one part of the article that is particularly illustrative of just how bad things are. It involves a meeting between (then) Deputy National Security advisor Stephen Hadley and a relatively little-known neo-conservative (and Lockheed executive) named Bruce P. Jackson. (You can see Jackson's PNAC biography here).

In November of 2002, Stephen J. Hadley, deputy national security advisor, asked Bruce Jackson to meet with him in the White House...

...according to Jackson, Hadley told him that "they were going to war and were struggling with a rationale" to justify it. Jackson, recalling the meeting, reports that Hadley said they were "still working out" a cause, too, but asked that he, Jackson, "set up something like the Committee on NATO" to come up with a rationale.

Here's what Jackson came up with.

What Bruce Jackson came up with for Hadley this time, in 2002, was the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq. The mission statement of the committee says it was "formed to promote regional peace, political freedom and international security by replacing the Saddam Hussein regime with a democratic government that respects the rights of the Iraqi people and ceases to threaten the community of nations."

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