Halliburton posted earnings from continuing operations [revenue jumped 63% due to the government-related business in the Middle East], which exclude the asbestos-related items, of $146 million, or 34 cents a share. A year earlier, the company reported a loss from continuing operations of $132 million, or 30 cents a share.
A loss of $132 million transforms into positive earnings of $146 million in just a year. How? One little war is all it took.
Of course, the company still managed to lose nearly a billion dollars anyway because of asbestos-related litigation and the "prepackaged bankruptcy of its DII Industries and Kellogg Brown & Root units."
All of which begs the question — was the war fought not only to restore George H. W. Bush's faulty legacy with respect to Gulf War I, but also Dick Cheney's faulty legacy with respect to his mismanagement of Halliburton?
As we've noted before, Halliburton's and therefore Cheney's financial secrets are safe now that its auditor Arthur Andersen was obliterated under the cover of the Enron scandal.
The Iraqi invasion killed two birds — Hussein ("he tried to kill my dad") and Halliburton's greedy missteps — with one stone, as it were, the stone being the fiscal health of the USA and the lives of hundreds of Americans and thousands of Iraqi civilians.
In Bush's and Cheney's minds that's a small price to pay for the ultimate historical legacy of a couple of privileged, secretive, deceitful, incompetent, useless men.
