| Interesting article. It's not as simple as it sounds, but getting some prosperity back into the country would help convince some that feudin' 'n fightin' is a losing game. |
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.
Brinkley said unemployment and under-employment of the proportions in Iraq would create unrest in any country. In a recent Military Review article he said Iraq’s unrelenting violence “is in no small part a result of economic distress”.
Increased industrial output creating more jobs would help Iraq achieve the reconciliation between the warring Shia majority and the Sunni Arab minority dominant under Saddam that politicians have so far been unable to bring about. “The job of political reconciliation is infinitely simplified when you have people trading with each other,” said Brinkley, who heads a task force, formed in late 2006, which works closely with the U.S military in Iraq.
Current policy needed to reflect pre-2003 conditions, when more than a decade of U.N. sanctions on Iraqi products had the indirect effect of leaving IraqÂ’s Shias, Sunni Arabs and Kurds with no choice but to trade among themselves.
Brinkley’s task force is now assessing factories across Iraq’s industrial base, from textiles to petrochemical industries, engineering and agriculture, to find suitable candidates for micro-financing grants. “These factories used to sell to each other. They couldn’t export, so Sunni, Shia and Kurd traded with each. They haven’t done that for several years,” he said.
Nine factories, from among 65 assessed by BrinkleyÂ’s task force, have already received funds from $50 million designated this year by the US Congress for industrial revitalisation. Brinkley said the $50 million was about $150 million short of what some estimates said would be needed but the US and Iraqi governments would likely be easily persuaded to contribute more if early successes were made.
Iraq’s deputy industry minister, Sami Al-Araji, said his department was working on a plan to have a small number of Iraqi textile products like men’s suits in US department stores by Thanksgiving or Christmas this year. “We thought we’ll start modestly,” Araji told a news conference. “You could call it a public relations campaign.”