Over at
BreitbartThe United States is launching a program to promote stability in a restive Iraqi province by employing more men of military age, US officials said Friday in a video hook-up from Baghdad.
The US Agency for International Development will next month launch the program in Salah ad Din province, which includes Tikrit, the home town of the late Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein, USAID representative Dave Bailey said.
In the near future I believe that one of the biggest 20/20 hindsight lessons we will glean from Iraq is that post-war stabilization requires immediate economic mitigation. For instance, at the same time the statue of Saddam was being pulled down in Baghdad, there should have been plane after plane of new Iraqi currency touching at Baghdad International. I supported (and still do) the decision to disband Iraq's military after the regime fell, but we probably should have continued to pay former soldiers and officers anyway. If we could have lessened the severity of the massive unemployment and economic dislocation following the shooting war we probably could have avoided or dramatically lessened the insurgency.
yours/
peter.
