Truthdig: The Second Insurgency

[marmar]

The Second Insurgency

Posted on Aug 18, 2008

By Anna Badkhen


BAGHDAD — Every morning for a year and a half, Tariq Razzaq has been coming to the decrepit entrance of a neighborhood maintenance office in southern Baghdad with a single goal in mind: to get a job. Every morning, the office employees turn him down.

It’s not that Razzaq, a 29-year-old former soldier in Saddam Hussein’s army, isn’t willing to do the lowest-paid manual labor: On a rare good day, the maintenance office asks Razzaq to perform one-time jobs cleaning trash and war debris out of gutters. It’s that he doesn’t have the money to bribe his way into a job.

“It’s simple: To find a steady job you need to have connections, or pay cash,” explains Razzaq, who spends most days with a group of other unemployed men loitering in the shadow of the maintenance office parking lot, hoping that someone will ask him to pump up his tires or wash his car. The other unemployed Iraqis nod emphatically in agreement.

By the end of this year, Iraq could have a $79-billion budget surplus, according to the U.S. Government Accountability Office. This sudden influx of petrodollars coincides with a dramatic decrease in violence, creating perfect conditions for Iraq to rebuild its war-ravaged infrastructure, health-care and education systems. But the government has spent only a fraction of its budget, and that means that in addition to an excruciatingly slow pace of rebuilding Iraq, job creation has been minimal. As many as half of all adult Iraqis are unemployed, economists here and in the U.S. estimate, making employment one of the highest-valued commodities in Iraq, on par with electricity and running water.

This shortage of jobs, superimposed on a tradition of using personal connections to do business, has led to what Iraqis complain is an explosion in corruption and graft among their nation’s officials. Corruption is so widespread that the U.S. inspector general for Iraq reconstruction, Stuart Bowen, called it the “second insurgency” in a recent interview with Cox newspapers. .......(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20080818_the_second_insurgency/?ln

[billyoc]

1. $79 billion would kickstart a great WPA program.