The Real Solution - Put Iraqis to Work

It seems so obvious, the biggest problem in Iraq is unemployment. Iraqis are forced into risking their lives, planting bombs, suiciding, joining the Army, or the police force, just to survive and die trying. I read this article several months ago and I think it's time to bring it up again. Where are the Dems on this issue? The right complains we have no ideas. This is the mother of all ideas. Put Iraqis back to work. Let them provide for their families. Quit outsourcing their jobs, quit importing stuffs they can provide themselves. Let them perform their own reconstruction. (Paid for by us, of course.) Why is this so hard to figure out? Why is it never mentioned on either side of the aisle?

Baghdad Year Zero
Pillaging Iraq in pursuit of a neocon utopia
by Naomi Klein

http://www.harpers.org/BaghdadYearZero.html

It was only after I had been in Baghdad for a month that I found what I was looking for. I had traveled to Iraq a year after the war began, at the height of what should have been a construction boom, but after weeks of searching I had not seen a single piece of heavy machinery apart from tanks and humvees. Then I saw it: a construction crane. It was big and yellow and impressive, and when I caught a glimpse of it around a corner in a busy shopping district I thought that I was finally about to witness some of the reconstruction I had heard so much about. But as I got closer I noticed that the crane was not actually rebuilding anything—not one of the bombed-out government buildings that still lay in rubble all over the city, nor one of the many power lines that remained in twisted heaps even as the heat of summer was starting to bear down. No, the crane was hoisting a giant billboard to the top of a three-story building. SUNBULAH: HONEY 100% NATURAL, made in Saudi Arabia.

Seeing the sign, I couldn’t help but think about something Senator John McCain had said back in October. Iraq, he said, is “a huge pot of honey that’s attracting a lot of flies.” The flies McCain was referring to were the Halliburtons and Bechtels, as well as the venture capitalists who flocked to Iraq in the path cleared by Bradley Fighting Vehicles and laser-guided bombs. The honey that drew them was not just no-bid contracts and Iraq’s famed oil wealth but the myriad investment opportunities offered by a country that had just been cracked wide open after decades of being sealed off, first by the nationalist economic policies of Saddam Hussein, then by asphyxiating United Nations sanctions.

Looking at the honey billboard, I was also reminded of the most common explanation for what has gone wrong in Iraq, a complaint echoed by everyone from John Kerry to Pat Buchanan: Iraq is mired in blood and deprivation because George W. Bush didn’t have “a postwar plan.” The only problem with this theory is that it isn’t true. The Bush Administration did have a plan for what it would do after the war; put simply, it was to lay out as much honey as possible, then sit back and wait for the flies.

* * *

The honey theory of Iraqi reconstruction stems from the most cherished belief of the war’s ideological architects: that greed is good. Not good just for them and their friends but good for humanity, and certainly good for Iraqis. Greed creates profit, which creates growth, which creates jobs and products and services and everything else anyone could possibly need or want. The role of good government, then, is to create the optimal conditions for corporations to pursue their bottomless greed, so that they in turn can meet the needs of the society. The problem is that governments, even neoconservative governments, rarely get the chance to prove their sacred theory right: despite their enormous ideological advances, even George Bush’s Republicans are, in their own minds, perennially sabotaged by meddling Democrats, intractable unions, and alarmist environmentalists.

more...
http://www.harpers.org/BaghdadYearZero.html

I thought I'd bring it up again. It is the answer.

Particularly when you

1. are primarily the police

2. are rebuilding infrastructure, esp. with foreign peeps/stuff

Put Iraqis back to work, get the foreign workers out. Period. Once the foreign workers are gone, our troops can leave. People will be busy trying to rebuild their lives - working. Without contract workers there taking all the jobs, at exhorbitant fees, our troops will have noone left to protect. I'm sure they're not spending a lot of time there protecting Iraqis, anyway.

:)

that NOBODY wants to talk about....

this is what is fueling the insurgency...the Rape of Iraq by multi-national corporations who are draining the money out of the country and depriving the economy of it's natural functions....

thanks for posting this...

I hope our Democratic leaders include this as part of THE DEMOCRATIC plan for Iraq.

Wouldn't be enough money left to funne; into the Military Industrial Complex. We can't have our contractors going poor!