The Iraq War wasn’t actually launched for the benefit of Halliburton, then vice president Dick Cheney’s former firm, as the charge went. Decades later, we can safely say that neoconservative hubris, geopolitical score-settling, and the drive to ensure US dominance in the Middle East loomed much larger in George W. Bush administration officials’ thinking.

But that doesn’t mean Halliburton didn’t make sure it got a decent place at the trough once the fix was in.

The Iraq War was many things: crime, blunder, catastrophe. But it was also a corporate bonanza, not just for Western oil companies licking their lips at the thought of the country’s vast oil fields but regarding the many logistical and infrastructural needs of postwar reconstruction that the private sector would be called upon to meet. And no company made headlines for taking advantage quite like Halliburton, whose subsidiary KBR (formerly Kellogg Brown & Root) infamously won a no-bid, five-year, $7 billion contract for work on Iraq’s oil sector one week before the invasion.