Dozens of Unemployed Iraqis Killed; Bush Twiddles His Thumbs

It's a cruel irony indeed that the same day at least 60 unemployed day labourers gathered to find work and were sadly killed by suicide bombers whose detruction also wounded 220 others, the Washington Post reports that the Pentagon has finally clued into the fact that Iraqis need jobs. But, as usual, it's much too little far too late.

Members of a small Pentagon task force have gone to the most dangerous areas of Iraq over the past six months to bring life to nearly 200 state-owned factories abandoned by the Coalition Provisional Authority after the U.S.-led invasion in 2003. Their goal is to employ tens of thousands of Iraqis in coming months, part of a plan to reduce soaring unemployment and lessen the violence that has crippled progress.

That would be Medal of Freedom recipient L. Paul Bremer's CPA.

Defense officials and military commanders say that festering unemployment -- at 70 percent in some areas -- is leading Iraqi men to take cash from insurgents to place bombs on roads or take shots at U.S. troops. Other Iraqis are joining sectarian attacks because their quality of life has slipped dramatically, officials say.

Not to mention the fact that they are repeatedly being killed in attacks just like today's.

"We need to put the angry young men to work," [the top U.S. field commander in Iraq] Chiarelli said in a phone interview from Baghdad.

The incompetence of the Bush administration's handling of the situation in Iraq obviously knows no bounds and the time it has taken to implement programs that would so obviously help the Iraqi people is absolutely unforgivable.

The idea that the creation of just 11,000 jobs in a country of 26 million people will have any kind of dramatic effect is just pathetically laughable and the fact that the Pentagon is only considering this plan now speaks volumes about how utterly obtuse Rumsfeld and his cronies have been all along.

Meanwhile, Bush has delayed announcing his so-called 'new way forward' until the new year (or until he can find enough critics of the ISG report to give him political cover for refusing to go ahead with its recommendations). This president has already had years in which he could have listened to advisers who might offer new solutions but because he has only surrounded himself with yes men, he is now absolutely clueless when it comes to figuring out what to do next. While he hesitates, people keep dying. But that obviously has never been a major consideration for him as he's stuck to his so-called stay the course plan which has resulted in this massive catastrophe.

There's been a lot of discussion lately on the more popular American Democratic sites about whether or not he should be impeached. To not impeach this criminal bastard would be a dereliction of congressional responsibility and a huge insult to all who have been so horrendously abused by his policies. It's long past the time for Bush to be held accountable and for justice to prevail.