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Politics : Formerly About Applied Materials -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: BWAC who wrote (69681)	4/11/2003 10:43:44 AM
From: thames_sider	Respond to of 70976

It's a rather dangerous position - these conscripts have presumably been taught basic weapon skills and hatred of the West, and that's it. Then they're ripped from their families, bombed into fleeing by an 'enemy' (who actually could care less about them, BWDTK) who is now more or less in power, and... what can they do? where do they go? We can probably provide some kind of work - on infrastructure - but they'll have to have considerable funding from elsewhere before it's paid for from Iraqi tax dollars. And from what you say, designing and building these things - with little or none of the support structure - is not easy. In particular, the country's been kept on starvation/war footing since 1990; I really doubt there's been over-much education, etc., under sanctions. So ~50% of the population (under 16) will be minimally skilled, and I also doubt we have much raw materials infrastructure - factories to make the bricks to buld the schools, that kind of thing - nor indeed people who know how to build the factories... It's going to be a tough job.