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A Couple of Things to Think About
by James Glaser
I believe what President Bush said was, "As the Iraqis stand up, we will stand down." That was the whole deal, the whole plan. We were training the "new" Iraqi Army, so that they could take over the job that the American forces had been doing for the last four plus years. Here is a headline from Nancy A. Youssef, writing for the McClatchy Newspapers on April 19, 2007—Training Iraqi troops no longer driving force in U.S. policy. Here is how the article starts out. "Washington — Military planners have abandoned the idea that standing up Iraqi troops will enable American soldiers to start coming home soon and now believe that U.S. troops will have to defeat the insurgents and secure control of troubled provinces." Here is the trouble with our trying to train the Iraqis. Every time we thought we had a unit trained and sent them out to the field, we found that "insurgents and militiamen had infiltrated the forces, using their power to carry out sectarian attacks." Right now George Bush and the Pentagon have no published plan to get our troops home. There is no "benchmark," like 30 trained Iraqi battalions, that the American people can look at and say, "Now our troops can come home." Every so often President Bush trots out statistics that show how well or economy is running and how much George's tax cuts have done for the labor market. Statistics are funny things, and you can make them say what you want by playing with the numbers. From time to time the President likes to talk about all the jobs he has created during his time in office, but you have to remember that there are good jobs and not so good jobs Martin Crutsinger, an Associated Press Economics Writer points out that "a total of 3.2 million—one in six factory jobs—have disappeared since the start of 2000." Crutsinger goes on with, "Even though manufacturing jobs have been declining, the country is enjoying the lowest average unemployment rates of the past four decades. The reason: the growth in the service industry—everything from chambermaids to skilled heart surgeons. Eighty-four percent of Americans in the labor force are employed in service jobs, up from 81 percent in 2000. The sector has added 8.78 million jobs since the beginning of 2000." I am sure that there are a lot more chambermaid jobs being created than heart surgeon jobs, and it wasn't that long ago that the Bush administration tried to redefine hamburger flippers at McDonalds as being in the manufacturing industry, but the truth is that even with low unemployment, the skill level, the pay scale, and the benefits of the American worker has been in decline all through George Bush's presidency. There will be a time in the near future that even if old plants could open back up, we will not have a trained work force to work there. The truth is that old plants can't open, because not only have we sent our good paying high skilled jobs overseas, we have also sent the machinery needed for those jobs overseas too. |
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