War’s Facilitators
Weekend Edition August 22-24, 2014
Richard House’s "The Kills"
War’s Facilitators
by CHARLES R. LARSON
Richard House’s colossal novel, The Kills, is composed of four separate novels, augmented by additional material (videos and extended passages) on line. It’s utterly brilliant, sui generis, compelling (except for one small lapse), and totally disturbing for what it says about America’s Iraq “experience.” No more devastating account of the war has been written, yet the focus is not on the military or soldiers but the contractors, non-combatants, employed by the thousands to support the military: build roads, bridges, entire cities, and bring in all the goods necessary to feed, clothe, and provide shelter for the fighters. Think of Dick Cheney’s beloved Halliburton Corporation and the way he hyped the need to invade Iraq in order to line his pockets and those of his friends. In short, the Iraq war was a business venture from day one, nothing else.
In Book I, “Sutler,” non-combatants are in the early stages of constructing “one of the largest engineering projects ever attempted. A new city in the desert…the gateway to the world’s largest oil reserve. It was supposed to make up for the failures of Baghdad (but) the plan was so large, so extraordinary, that no one had their eyes on him,” (Sutler, the man brought in to build the project). Sutler has 53 million dollars at his disposal, yet barely has the project begun—it’s near the end of the war—before he’s told to close it down. What’s been implemented is a series of burn pits, huge holes in the sand, large enough that there isn’t anything that can’t be destroyed: entire vehicles, “chemical, human, and animal waste,” including body parts, and—later—government documents. In essence, covering up the evidence.
Then the directive comes that the entire site must be destroyed; the project is aborted, and Sutler (who has been in Iraq on a fake passport and given a pseudonym) is told to get out of the location immediately and he’ll be rewarded with enough money in foreign bank accounts that he’ll be adequately compensated. The plan backfires; there’s an explosion, people are killed or injured, Sutler flees, and his puppeteers believe he has access to most of the 53 million. Much later, in Part II, another character puts all these events into context: “This is how government works. They make decisions, they appoint money to those decisions, and they expect others to bid and take on those projects. There’s a whole complicated structure for this which has government agencies and private businesses at each other neck and neck. It’s in everyone’s interest to have the money used up before it gets sucked back. That’s how it works around here. “ Except that is this case the money was barely used.
Most of the rest of Book I segues into an elaborate plan to track Sutler down, as he flees overland, into Turkey eventually and beyond. Sutler is robbed on one occasion, loses the codes for the bank account transfer of the money rightfully his, and that richard_house_the-killsincident and its aftermath introduce several new characters in pursuit of him, with bodies strewn along the way, implying that his employer for the whole project, HOSCO International, operates outside of the law not only within Iraq but beyond. The intrigue, the pursuit, takes on the aura of the best espionage novel, with numerous tense scenes and cliffhangers, as chapters abruptly end and the narration shifts to another character.
More:
http://www.counterpunch.org/2014/08/22/wars-facilitators/
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