Thanks to the U.S. invasion:
"Turmoil in Iraq leaves skilled workforce with limited job options" by Tina Susman, Los Angeles Times | January 27, 2008
BAGHDAD - Night after night, hour after hour, Hussein Ali Mohammed sits alone inside the medical clinic that employs him as a guard.
It is not the job the 26-year-old envisioned when he earned his teaching degree, but it's the best he can do in a country teeming with educated, ambitious people and sorely lacking in jobs that pay living wages.
Years of political turmoil, US-imposed sanctions, and war have devastated Iraq's workforce. Hundreds of thousands of skilled professionals have left the country. Businesses have closed. Insurgents and thugs have targeted professors, doctors, and businesspeople, killing them, abducting them, or driving them out of their jobs and out of Iraq.
Even as sectarian violence subsides, the options are limited for those who remain.
Shi'ite Muslims, who say they were held back from good jobs under Saddam Hussein's Sunni Muslim-led regime, complain that corruption and violence now limit their opportunities.
Sunni Arabs say they are discriminated against as payback for Hussein's past mistreatment of Shi'ites, who now dominate the government.
"I feel this job doesn't suit my dignity or personality, being a guard in a clinic, passing the night between four walls talking to nobody," said Mohammed, who lives in Hillah, a city about 60 miles south of Baghdad. "I think it is difficult to find the job I would like in Iraq, under the current circumstances. I wish I could leave Iraq, but it is not that easy."
That is about the biggest indictment of Bush as any I've ever seen!
Iraq's government estimates unemployment at 17.6 percent and underemployment at 38 percent, but those are considered conservative figures.
The problem is seen as one of the major threats to the country's long-term recovery. To make matters more precarious, about 60 percent of the population is under age 30 - and many young people are ripe for recruitment into criminal life if the money is right.
So are they criminals or insurgents, and does the U.S. give a shit?
"A lot of these people are pretty much stagnant with low-income wages," said Colonel Gabe Lifschitz of the US military's Gulf Region Division, composed of military and civilian personnel working on reconstruction projects in Iraq.
Without middle-class people creating job opportunities for low-wage earners to move up the economic ladder, Lifschitz said, Iraq's economy would flat-line, breeding anger and discontent.
"The way to go in and turn that around is, you want to have somebody who is employed. That person who is employed will have less likelihood of becoming an insurgent."
Unless they are British doctors, right?
Remember the false-flag incompetents of Glasgow, readers?
US officials are funding programs to give vocational training to would-be laborers, but those do little for middle-class educated Iraqis such as Mohammed, who say their job-seeking skills are stymied by political nepotism and corruption in the institutions that might hire them.
Akeel Mohsin Sharif, 29, graduated from Baghdad University four years ago with a degree in computer sciences. Recently, he said, a medical college invited him to apply for a job as a teacher's assistant.
"After three months of pushing and pulling and doing interviews for the job, they kept coming up with excuses for not hiring me," Sharif said. "At the end, they asked me for $400 in exchange for the job."
Sharif refused. "Why should I pay them? Our lives have become all bribes. Everyone has to bribe someone to get anything done," said Sharif, whose previous job overseeing computer maintenance ended when the business closed because of security concerns."
More indictments of Bush and his war crime invasion!
Tell me again how much better things are in Iraq since this misguided war crime of an invasion?
