Iraqi Unemployment
The Administration Shifts Tactics
By Daniel Muniz

Perhaps one of the most tragic flaws that the Bush Administration is now belatedly trying to fix in Iraq is the soaring unemployment rate. Immediately after the invasion, certain top officials thought it was a no-brainer that millions of Iraqis needed to keep their jobs or at least have new employment offered to them. Living a couple of years without a job especially when you have a family to support is more than reason enough for an ordinary Iraqi to be disgruntled with any government in place.

But furthermore, employment is an extremely effective means to win the hearts and minds of the population. Instead, the Administration thought otherwise and formulated a series of poor decisions that resulted in far too many Iraqis not having any source of income for the next couple of years.

For instance, prior to the war, Iraq had 148 state run factories employing over 100,000 people. During the invasion, the factories were looted so they required plenty of money to repair them. The Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) refused to provide any cash infusions. The CPA simply thought that private foreign investors would scoop them up and immediately turn them into profitable facilities.

Needless to say, that never happened. The country was never safe enough to persuade outside industrialists to take a chance on an economy already in shambles.

Next, the CPA implemented a severe de-Baathification program to fire any government employee at any level who was associated with the Baath party. The results were disastrous, especially for Sunnis because it meant that many of them would probably never get another job with that kind of stigma attached to them.

And as it happens all too often, zero tolerance programs usually come with zero common sense.

There were a vast number of government employees who were members of the Baath Party because that was the only way to get a job or to get promoted. Many of them had absolutely nothing to do with the atrocities of Saddam’s regime yet they were now treated as criminals. The murderers and those who did abuse and torture the population need to be brought to justice but it is absurd to have that same mentality for ordinary civilians.

The United States didn’t follow this zero-tolerance policy with Nazi Germany because we knew full well that many people were forced to join the Nazi party in order to get a job or to get promoted. If the US applied this zero common sense mentality to Germany, we would never have been able to enjoy the expertise of Werner Von Braun, Hitler’s top rocket scientist, who got our space program to the moon. In fact, the Allies relied on quite a number of former Nazis who were not involved in any atrocities to help rebuild the country.

Instead, too many Iraqis, especially Sunnis, lost their jobs and they were unable to secure any type of employment. For example, thousands of teachers were fired leaving schools with almost no capability to function. As a result, the marginalization of Sunnis only added to the discontent.

Fortunately, the Administration is finally changing its strategies on how to deal with the economy. It is tossing aside its idealism for hard nose pragmatism.

Now, I am a huge supporter of the free market but I also understand when pragmatism must take precedence. There are times of crisis in which the government has to solve problems. Naturally, I don’t want a government that feels that it has to solve every perceived problem under the sun but I expect it to do something constructive during a crisis.

In the beginning, the Administration was filled with too many people who loathed the concept of nation building. I am in no way a fan of nation building because it should not be a component of foreign policy, especially the way that Bill Clinton and many other Democrats had envisioned it. The United States is not obligated to build everyone’s roads and bridges and infrastructure. However, in the case of war, nation building is absolutely essential because idle hands have to be occupied doing something constructive, like feeding a family.

If someone is a breadwinner, then they are less inclined to participate in something that could get them fired. In addition, they are also reluctant to support anything that could cause their place of employment to fail. All down the line, a source of income is a win-win situation for everybody.

But more to the point, what kind of people represent the best recruits for the insurgencies?

They are usually the idle and the unemployed, especially the people who have been marginalized. In fact, the United States feared the same thing during the Great Depression in that the masses of unemployed workers would become so disillusioned that they would revolt against the government. Huge construction projects of that era built many of the great monumental structures of this country and they also helped stem some of those fears.

Although the media hasn’t reported much on this, the Iraqi economy is actually improving. There are certain sectors that are thriving especially now that the people who do have a job can make choices that were never available to them. And there are plenty of scrappy entrepreneurs and risk takers who are making a profit. Now that the United States is finally implementing many of the recommendations that were first ignored, perhaps Iraq can begin employing its idle population that can very well transform their economy while stabilizing its society.

Yes, mistakes were made but I am relived that the Administration is now correcting some of them.

Any opinions or views expressed herein belong solely to the author and does not represent any employer, organization, political party, governmental agency, or any other entity and do not necessarily reflect the views of the site owner or its participants.