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WASHINGTON - As we begin the New Year, President Bush has promised to reveal his plans for winning the war in Iraq. While the American people made it clear in the election last November that they want our troops brought home, the President has signaled that, instead of listening, he may actually deploy more troops.
Among the other ideas being floated by the President's advisors is a plan to provide jobs to unemployed Iraqis as a way of weakening the insurgency in Iraq. Lt. Gen. Peter Chiarelli, the second highest ranking American Army officer in Iraq, floated the idea that "angry young men" involved in sectarian violence could be pacified by gainful employment. Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich endorsed the idea, remarking that 60 percent unemployment in Iraq, a nation of 25 million people, was a "disaster."
Neither Gen. Chiarelli or Mr. Gingrich provided any evidence that the gunmen involved in Iraq's religious civil war would give up their grenade launchers for regular paychecks. But the theory that good paying jobs can turn young men on the margins into productive citizens is sound. I only wish their generosity had been aimed at unemployed workers in the U.S., many of whom are risking their lives fighting in Iraq as a substitute for poor job prospects at home.
In major inner cities such as New York unemployment among Black and Hispanic young men is at crisis levels of 50 percent or more. U.S. prisons are filled with our own hopeless and "angry young men" who might never have been locked up if they had been employed, or at least, employable.
The Bush Administration is consumed with terrorism and the war in Iraq, while here at home, poverty, unemployment, crime, and the hopelessness that results, are the gravest homegrown threats to our national security.
In 2006, one out of three of New York City's children were living in poverty (54 percent for female headed single parent families). With barely 50 percent of the city's Black men holding jobs in 2003, unemployment (and incarceration in many cases) were the main reasons for the father's absence.
Of the 2.2 million Americans locked up in federal, state and local prisons in the U.S. 40 percent are Black. In some large cities such as Baltimore, where the schools are failing and poverty is rampant, more than 50 percent of the young Black men are in prison, on parole or probation. Unlike Iraq, religion is not a cause of their anger. Poverty, ignorance and hopelessness are.
The Bush Administration likes to boast about the low national unemployment rate of around 5 percent. But the dirty little secret is that unemployment among teenaged African Americans and Hispanics is at historic highs. Nationally, one out of three Black men aged 16-19 is out of work. In New York City, the figure is closer to 50 percent. In a country wealthy enough to invest $20 billion in non-military infrastructure and professional training in Iraq since the beginning of the war, 50 percent unemployment anywhere in the U.S. is a national disgrace.
I have no idea whether Gen. Chiarelli's job creation plan for Iraq has any merit. But I do know that the Bush Administration has failed utterly in addressing the employment crisis in the neediest communities in the U.S. While investments in Iraq are off-budget and apparently without limit, the Administration and defeated Republican-controlled Congress have actually reduced the nation's commitment to training unemployed and displaced workers here at home.
A notable example is the Workforce Investment Act, the federal government's largest job training legislation. Since 2002, appropriations for the program have decreased from a high of $5.7 billion in 2002 to $5.1 billion in 2006, a reduction of $600 million. Appropriations to the program during the period of the Iraq War, from 2003 to the present, totaled about $19 billion, less than the $20 billion appropriated for reconstruction and employment training in Iraq during the same period.
Gen. Ghiarelli's proposal has not received much attention, but it should have. Putting our unemployed young men to work at home is more important than creating jobs for gunmen in Iraq.
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