The conclusion of the Halliburton Agenda

Bob Grace is not a political man. Since 1976 he has run GSM Consulting, a small engineering consulting firm in Amarillo, Texas, advising oil companies on drilling strategies and well-control methods. It’s not glamorous work, and it’s not particularly profitable. Grace runs a small office of 10 employees, and still travels personally from site to site most days of the month, plying his trade. He teaches in drilling schools, he manages drilling projects, and works about a half dozen wild well control jobs a year. Bob Grace doesn’t care for politics and doesn’t know much about them. He is simply a small business owner scraping by from year to year.

But in the wake of the first Gulf War, Bob Grace became something more than a simple businessman. As he recalls his time in Kuwait, leading an international team that extinguished more than 300 oil-well fires set by Saddam Hussein’s retreating troops, his even tone and Texas drawl tighten up a bit, betraying his pride and excitement of his time in the Middle East. Grace worked for nearly nothing in Kuwait, but he is enormously proud of the work he did there, both from a professional and patriotic standpoint. He knows that rebuilding the Kuwaiti oil fields was his crowning professional achievement, but he also feels that it was one of the finest things he accomplished as a human being. “They said it would take five years to put out those fires, but we did it in less than a year,” he told me with thinly veiled pride.

But when talk of a U.S. invasion of Baghdad was dominating the headlines as early as the fall of 2002, Bob Grace found himself suddenly unappreciated by the same government that had relied on his expertise 10 years earlier. Despite dozens of phone calls to everyone from the Pentagon to his local representative, he could not extract even the littlest bit of information about how he should offer up his services again in Iraq. He got form letters in response to his inquiries. He was dismissed and disregarded by government agencies. One decade after he had worked nine straight months putting out mighty fires in Kuwait, away from his family, for very little financial gain, he was persona non grata.

https://exploringrealhistory.blogspot.com/2019/11/part-5-of-5-halliburton-agendafall-from.html