Hybrid New Deal-Military Keynesianism for Iraq?
Steve DeAngelis of ERMB had an excellent post on Iraq that I believe has a lot of resonance for historians:
“Dealing with Iraq’s Great Depression”
“When Americans think about the Great Depression of the 1930s, they think about soup kitchens, unemployment, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal. Those people who managed to remain employed during the depression were considered fortunate. To some extent that is the situation facing people in southern Iraq (the northern Kurdish sector is booming in comparison). The U.S. just announced a new approach for dealing with the lack of jobs and the lack of security in the south. It is a mixture of Roosevelt’s New Deal and Lyndon Baines Johnson’s Great Society programs [“U.S. Plans to Form Job Corps For Iraqi Security Volunteers,” by Karen DeYoung and Amit R. Paley, Washington Post, 7 December 2007]. Once again it is the U.S. military leading the way.
“The U.S. military plans to establish a civilian jobs corps to absorb tens of thousands of mostly Sunni security volunteers whom Iraq’s Shiite-dominated government has balked at hiring into local police forces. The new jobs program marks a sharp departure from one of the most highly touted goals of the so-called Sunni awakening, which was to funnel the U.S.-paid volunteers, many of them former insurgents, into Iraq’s police and military.”
The program aims at alleviating two of the most crucial challenges facing southern Iraq — jobs and security. As DeYoung and Paley report, the program is aimed primarily at Sunni citizens who have been unable to find work under the Shi’ite regime. The program has raised questions, however.
“President Bush and Gen. David H. Patraeus, the U.S. commander in Iraq, have said the volunteers have played a major role in the recent downturn in violence and would provide a key element of local security as U.S. forces draw down. Plans to reconfigure the program raise new questions about the permanence of security and political structures the United States has sought to impose on Iraq.”
The Bush administration’s program seems to be based on three assumptions. First, people need jobs so they can once again feel good about themselves and support their families. Second, jobs help the security situation by eliminating many unhappy and unemployed people from the list of potential insurgent supporters and, by giving them a stake in the future, Sunnis will get involved in the war against the insurgents. And third, the job program reduces sectarian violence by getting Sunni and Shi’ites working side by side.
Read the whole thing here.
The period of the Great Depression and the later postwar occupation is rich with potential lessons and analogies for exercises in state-building in Iraq or elsewhere. Steve mentioned the Civilian Conservation Corps as a model, probably one of the most popular public memories of the New Deal. a program where adolescents and young men of all backgrounds did public works and environmental projects under the supervision of active and retired U.S. Army NCO’s .
Iraq certainly does not lack for oportunities to repair or improve infrastructure, something that would both create jobs and future platforms to facilitate economic growth as well as enmeshing local elites in positive partnerships with coalition forces. My suggestion here, to build on Steve’s New Deal paradigm, would be to complement any physical construction -jobs effort with one of the New Deal’s least appreciated major programs which would be even more appropriate for Iraq today than it was for the United States in the 1930’s, the Reconstruction Finance Corporation.
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