Almost past belief

This is just such a time. The news that shattered and partially dismantled Iraq has paid out over $40 billion in so-called "reparations" is bad enough.

But to find out to whom that vast sum has been or is about to be paid to is so shattering as to be almost incredible.

That a country which has been illegally invaded, which has lost over 650,000 of its population, which has been carved up between the oil transnationals and the states that host them and which has had a puppet government foisted on it which has no more relation to democracy than fly in the air should have to pay reparations is, in itself, ludicrous.

That the companies which are claiming large slices of that $40 billion should include Kentucky Fried Chicken is appalling.

But that the list should include Halliburton, the scandal-plagued oil company that US Vice-President Dick Cheney used to run and which has been coining it ever since the war started, firstly by winning the contract to put out the oilfield fires that the US started and latterly by multibillion dollar "reconstruction" contracts to rebuild what the US and Britain demolished in the course of the war, is utterly beyond the bounds of reason.

After that, the news that Bechtel, which recently announced that it is leaving Iraq after three years of work there, during which it pocketed a cool $2.3 billion should have the unmitigated gall to join the queue for reparation handouts, merely puts the icing sugar on the cake.

And it is not just companies that are hitching themselves to this vulture-dominated bandwagon. The government of Kuwait has already been awarded over $273 million and is now picking up another $335 million.

The government of Saudi Arabia has trousered over $85 million and has just added another, comparatively modest, $30 million chunk to its coffers.

One wonders on what these sums are based. Certainly Kuwait lost massive oil revenues during the invasion by Saddam Hussein's Iraq.

But it is almost certain that those sums have been more than equalled by the enormous increase in oil revenues generated by the price rises in the wake of the war.

With the US companies, one is driven to ponder just what the compensation is for. Is KFC, for example, seeking redress because the US government and its allies killed 650,000 potential customers for its family bucket?

And is Halliburton aggrieved that it hasn't been afforded the chance to employ those 650,000 people and extract a bit of surplus value?

Whatever the reasons, this obscene example of victors' justice must stop. It is not Saddam who is paying.

It is the dazed and bloodied people of a country that has been trashed in a resource war that was none of their making, based on lies that are still being uncovered today - who are paying, while their infrastructure lies in ruins, their security is negligible and their sons and daughters lie dead. This cannot be allowed to continue.