Pentagon Buys New Uniforms, Armored Vehicles From Recently Reopened Factories in Iraq

Source: AP

Pentagon Buys New Uniforms, Armored Vehicles From Recently Reopened Factories in Iraq
03-28-2007 5:40 PM
By PAULINE JELINEK, Associated Press Writer

WASHINGTON (Associated Press) -- In an Iraq jobs program, the Pentagon has helped reopen three factories shuttered after the 2003 invasion, seeding the ground by buying uniforms and armored vehicles for its Iraqi allies from two of them.

Reopening state-owned factories that produced everything from cement to buses for Saddam Hussein's regime is among efforts President Bush hopes will boost the economy and help salvage a violent Iraq. His strategy of increasing troops there to try to calm violence is meant to buy the Iraqi government time to move forward on political reconciliation and reconstruction.

In a program started nearly a year ago, the Defense Department has reopened a large textile factory in Najaf by buying uniforms for Iraqi soldiers and police that the U.S. has been training and has reopened a vehicle factory south of Baghdad by buying armored vehicles, said Paul Brinkley, deputy undersecretary of defense in charge of Pentagon business modernization efforts. He has been running the program.

Officials helped find other customers for the third restarted factory, in Ramadi, which makes ceramic products.

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I didn't think so.

But I agree about the US jobs too. Funny.

Why am I compelled to think this was a mistake? Surely they didn't plan this!

:silly:

It was likely a local incentive.

fantastic potential for nearly endless war in that country. At least they opened the right manufacturing businesses. Next, guns, ammo, and explosives plants, so they can keep the mayhem revved up for another, say, 50 years?

Wasn't that the idea?

To treat returning troops. So who do they support

... what will the people who make money at the military goods factories spend their paychecks on?