Economic policy mistakes hurt Iraq: US official - War profiteering

[NNN0LHI]

http://www.khaleejtimes.ae/DisplayArticleNew.asp?xfile=data/focusoniraq/2007/August/focusoniraq_August68.xml§ion=focusoniraq&col=

Economic policy mistakes hurt Iraq: US official
(Reuters)

12 August 2007



BAGHDAD - Years of economic policy mistakes after the fall of Saddam Hussein left unemployed young Iraqis easy targets for recruitment by Al Qaeda and other insurgents, a US Defense Department official said on Sunday.

Paul Brinkley, deputy under-secretary of defense for business transformation in Iraq, said Iraq’s shattered industrial base had to be revitalised to bring down unemployment levels of about 60 percent and help reconciliation.

He said political, social and economic stability would be much easier if factories, many left idle since the 2003 invasion to topple Saddam, could win even a small fraction of the trade the United States conducts every year with economies like China, India, Indonesia and Thailand.

“If we could just get some of that factored into Iraq we’d uplift the lives of every Iraqi and Al Qaeda wouldn’t have any people to recruit,” Brinkley told Reuters in an interview.

Brinkley said early economic planners had made the understandable mistake of assuming that a free market would rapidly emerge to replace what he described as Saddam’s ”kleptocracy”, and create full employment.

This mistaken assumption led to a series of decisions which ”sowed the seeds of economic malaise and fuelled insurgent sympathies” after industrial production collapsed and imports flooded in to replace locally made goods.

[booley]

1. This was news

4 years ago when Naomi Klein was reporting the same thing.

Maybe this is redundent but why is the mainstream media always years behind the progressive media?

[lyonn]

2. They are a wee bit late with this brilliant conclusion

From day one, the idea of putting the people of Iraq to work, cleaning up the bombing messes could have been a good start. Sheesh

The idea of bringing in workers from other countries to do the jobs Iraqis should have been given is another mind boggling FU, what were they thinking? We wonder why they hate us. Our govt. has treated the Iraqis worse than Saddam.

[pansypoo53219]

3. we needed FDR

unfortunately we got Harding + Hoover.