Peer Nyberg

“Vespasian continued his down-to-earth line in self-deprecating wit right up until his last words: ‘Oh dear, I think I’m becoming a god …”
― Mary Beard, SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome

“President Obama’s decision to launch airstrikes against ISIS in the summer of 2014 raised the potential for a completely new war on terror, without ever having declared an end to the previous one. It also signified a questionable “whack-a-mole” strategy, in which the U.S. targets Islamic militant insurgencies before they ever attack the United States, just in case they might do so in the future. That strategy would almost guarantee that those groups will eventually turn against us, and that the endless war on terror would remain endless.”
― James Risen, Pay Any Price: Greed, Power, and Endless War

“KBR won its coveted role in Iraq while it was a subsidiary of Halliburton, the company Vice President Dick Cheney ran before the 2000 presidential campaign. KBR was later spun off from Halliburton, but by then, it was well entrenched with a virtual monopoly over basic services for American troops in Iraq. At the height of the war, KBR had more than fifty thousand personnel and subcontractors working for it in Iraq, making the company’s presence in Iraq larger than that of the British Army.”
― James Risen, Pay Any Price: Greed, Power, and Endless War

“KBR went on to become far and away the largest single Pentagon contractor of the entire war, receiving a combined total of $39.5 billion in contracts, according to calculations by the Financial Times in 2013.”
― James Risen, Pay Any Price: Greed, Power, and Endless War