Iraqis don't have jobs either

[GreenPartyVoter]

WASHINGTON — The Pentagon (news - web sites)'s $18.4-billion Iraq (news - web sites) reconstruction plan puts too much emphasis on big-ticket construction projects and not enough on creating jobs for Iraqis, State Department officials who have taken control of the program have concluded.

U.S. Ambassador John D. Negroponte is reviewing the program and hopes to come up with new priorities next month, State Department officials said. The department will then have to seek approval from the House and Senate appropriations committees to shift funds.

The move to redirect resources is likely to further delay some of the rebuilding, which already has been hampered by sabotage, red tape and infighting. U.S. officials see the reconstruction effort as critical to stabilizing Iraq and fostering democracy there.

Changing the program won't be easy, because the allocations were approved by Congress, which established categories for specific projects, a senior State Department official said. Department officials said they didn't yet know how much money they would ask to redistribute.

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=2026&ncid=2026&e=4&u=/latimests/20040722/ts_latimes/statedeptcriticizesfocusofiraqeffort

[shoelace414]

1. Iraqi's with jobs

don't plant bombs.

[GreenPartyVoter]

2. Judging by the number of bombs, I would say quite a few are jobless.

[Warpy]

3. It's amazing to note that when news of murdered workers

in Iraq is presented, people remain clueless about why this is happening, and why even noncombatant countries' workers are being targeted.

The biggest blunder was invading in the first place. After the invasion, what they did to turn this whole enterprise from a blunder with a remote chance of success to a complete catastrophe is by rewarding all the paper "coalition" memebers (along with well connected US and British companies) with contracts to do all the work that should have been done by the Iraqis! We're paying premium prices to hire laborers from all the coalition countries to do work that the Iraqis would have done for ten cents on the taxpayer dollar. At the same time that we're throwing taxpayer money down the corporate sewer, the Iraqis have been jobless, frustrated, and economically desperate for over a year!

I can't believe the stupidity of this operation, lurching from disaster to debacle and back to disaster. This has gone beyond mere incompetence, since it reflects quid pro quo agreements with corporations that have close ties to the administration. Let's call this level of arrogance and greed what it is: treason.

Just as the Iraqis are crying out to get their country, their jobs, and their hope back, we should be crying out for justice here, to charge, try, convict, and imprison all the profiteers who have gotten unimaginably richer on the sweat of the taxpayers and the blood of the dead.

[Ms. Clio]

4. "lurching from disaster to debacle and back to disaster"

Such an excellent description.

It's my understanding that after World War 2, no U.S. firms were permitted to profit from the reconstruction of Germany.