Our "Works Progress Administration" in Iraq

As the president gets set to reveal his new strategy for Iraq, we’ve learned that it includes a billion dollars for job training and make-work programs to help unemployed Iraqis. Frustrated by the stubbornness of the violence and chaos, military commanders are seeking to bring unemployment down, seeing it as a major contributor to the insurgency.

It may well be, and the Pentagon’s frustration is understandable. But isn’t anarchy and sectarian violence a major contributor to unemployment? The two surely work in tandem with a negative feedback dynamic. If we were going to stop the cycle, with all due respect to the military commanders, one would think that creating a monopoly on violence would be an easier task for an occupying army than trying to control the Iraqi economy Keynesian style.

In fact, when histories are written on this conflict, future generations will surely conclude that the U.S. placed way too little emphasis on creating security and much too much emphasis on Iraqi public works projects and related programs. These have suffered from the sluggish release of funds, from the high cost of doing business in Iraq (due to the violence), from direct insurgent attacks, and from a not surprising high level of graft.

What, then, makes us think that more of these WPA projects for Iraq will have any efficacy at all? Surely, if they were proposed for inner-city urban American they would be roundly denounced in neo-conservative circles. What makes us think that government directed job programs with vague goals, administered by U.S. bureaucrats and filtered through Iraq during a civil war are the policy scalpel that’s going to bring down unemployment, and thereby cripple the insurgency, and thereby reduce sectarian tensions in Iraq ?

There is no credible philosophical basis for it whatsoever. Nor is there any heartening precedent. Over the last four years, we’ve been pumping billions of dollars into Iraq for public works projects with apparently little beneficial effect on the overall security situation or our reputation.

Moreover, even if you are a deep believer in the healing power of U.S guided public spending programs in Iraq, what can 1 billion possibly accomplish ? It’s chump change. We’ve lost more than 8 to 9 times that in funds that are completely unaccounted for – and shrugged it off as just the cost of doing business.

I’ll wait for the speech on Wednesday night, but its sounds like this component of the president’s plan merely allows him to play off his strategy as "comprehensive". It’s just another ornament on a withering tree.