to receive $150,000 a year in deferred compensation from Halliburton and has
stock options worth more than $18 million in it. Conversely, to help ensure
Cheney’s reelection and that of his allies, Halliburton funneled more than half a
million dollars to the Republican Party.^31
The Bush family has historic ties to the oil industry, and early in Bush’s
presidency, Vice President Cheney convened a secret energy task force
comprised mainly of oil industry insiders. In 2003 a political insider, Tom
Foley, former speaker of the house, bluntly assailed the good guy interpretation
of U.S. foreign policy, implicitly offering a far less flattering picture of a U.S.
administration waging war on behalf of private oil firms: “Our belief is that
we are not self-interested. For example, our perception is that we didn’t go to
war against Iraq to dominate the oil market, and we’re very offended if anyone
suggests such a thing. We always excuse ourselves from self-interested
motives.”^32 If anyone still doubted that oil played a key role, in 2007 Dow
Jones announced that Iraq’s puppet parliament was considering a law “which
the U.S. government has been helping to craft” that would give giant Western
oil companies thirty-year contracts to extract Iraqi oil. Moreover, 75 percent of
the profits in the early years would go to the foreign companies, compared to
an average of 10 percent in other oil-producing countries.^33
No textbook suggests that reasons such as these played any part in our
decision to go to war, our selection of Iraq as target, or such tactical matters—
now widely understood to be blunders—as the choice to sideline entities such
as France, Germany, and the United Nations from participating in the
rebuilding and reorganization of Iraq. Textbooks never do. Even though several
textbooks note the boost in the polls that Americans gave George H. W. Bush
after America’s quick victory in the Persian Gulf War, authors never suggest
domestic politics as an explanation for war.^34 Instead, they choose to believe
the reasons officials supply for their actions, rather than peering beneath the
surface. Note the perspective adopted in the first sentence of the account of the
Iraq War in The Americans, for example: “In 2003, Bush expanded the war on
terrorism to Iraq.” As we have seen, attacking Iraq had nothing to do with “the
war on terrorism.” Soon enough, even Bush had to admit there was no
connection.^35 Nevertheless, the president and vice president continued making
their now contradicted statements linking Iraq and the 9/11 terrorist attacks.
Political scientists Amy Gershkoff and Shana Kushner have shown that this
imaginary connection was the primary wellspring of public support for the