Replace the Iron Fist With a Helping Hand

by GreenDreams
The Washington Post reports the Pentagon is (finally) proposing to create jobs in Iraq. The “goal is to employ tens of thousands of Iraqis in coming months, part of a plan to reduce soaring unemployment and lessen the violence that has crippled progress”. Thanks to Michael Stickings’ post over at The Moderate Voice.

This is a point I have made repeatedly during the course of this war. To date, our military expense is equal to around $70,000 per Iraqi family, in a country whose median income has slipped to $144 per year. For what we have spent trying to batter Iraq into submission, we could probably have bought all the weapons, employed the entire population at twice their median income, fixed the infrastructure and quite possibly won the hearts and minds of the Iraqi people. I firmly believe that most of the population wants just what we want: peace and prosperity, family and friends, a secure home, a toaster, refrigerator, microwave; in short, a decent life free of the strife of war.

We are always more willing to pay for war rather than peace. Our military budget is 28.5% of the total federal budget, while our foreign aid budget is 0.55%. Poverty, hunger and fear feeds all kinds of hostility, crime, despair and desperation. A helping hand is far more helpful and far less expensive than the iron fist.

Reader Kim Ritter comments

I agree totally. The military has been saying for some time now that they alone, could not provide security for Iraq-that there had to be economic and political progress as well. These days the army and police force provide the only stable part of the work force, and many of the insurgents might have chosen a different path if there were jobs available. We’d be rioting too in this country if unemployment was at 60%, and almost four years after the invasion there wasn’t enough clean water or electricity. This solution is only common sense, but as the author claims, is three years too late.

Maybe it is too late. But what a change there would be if the Democrats step in, send a Congressional delegation of negotiators with enough aid money to truly turn around the economic and social decline and say, “the new team is in power now, and we want to fix what our misguided and discredited former leaders broke, and get you all back to some semblance of the life and work you deserve.”

I’m no Pollyanna. I know there are deep sectarian hatreds in the region, but here’s a way to change our “destroy and leave” perception to one of “we’re rebuilding, not occupying”.