Obama's 'Jobs For ISIL' As Silly As Bush's 'Nation Building'
When the United States was fighting terrorism in Iraq there was an unrelenting critique that President Bush's policy was misguided. His vision that America could establish a stronghold for democracy in the region was dismissed as "nation building." Opponents said that the region was so backward, so organized around incomprehensible social and tribal rules, that its citizens would be unable to appreciate the benefits of self-determination. Democracy could not "break out" in such places.
In fact, the United States spent billions on programs to get businesses started on the belief that if poverty were resolved, if unemployed male youth had jobs, then the "root cause" of violence would be addressed and both democracy and prosperity could emerge.
Resolving root causes of social problems has been a staple of progressive policy since the beginning of the twentieth century. This is what policy experts do; read history backward and see what went wrong. Inevitably there is a modern day "fix" that promises to undo the effectives of history's causal agent. The record, however, is that the solutions that root cause analysis produces invariably make problems worst. It's the social problem equivalent of Heisenberg's principal. There is no ex-ante to go back to.
So it is with exporting root cause analysis to the seat of international terror in the Middle East. Immediately upon the close of the recent Summit on Countering Violent Extremism, a State Department spokeswoman declared that "We're killing a lot of them and we're going to keep killing more of them...but we cannot kill our way out of this war" with a nonchalance that not only devalues all life but denies the moral basis of our nation's lethal action against al-Qaeda.
No, rather, we must treat the root causes of violence by providing jobs and new hope to the unemployed of the region. Suddenly we hear that if we turn all of our public resources, the "whole of government" can make violent extremism recede. As if ISIL would consent, we are asked to believe that collectively our government agencies can solve unemployment problems in what's left of Syria and Libya and peace will result.
This was the basis of the strategy advanced once before when another "whole of government" approach was tried in rebuilding the Iraqi economy. USAID, advising the State and Defense Departments, spent billions on economy building. In the end no new jobs materialized. Indeed, given our chronic high levels of domestic unemployment it's not clear anyone in the whole of our government knows much about creating jobs at home, let alone abroad.
It won't be long before someone in government rediscovers the link between new firms and the expansion of employment. Entrepreneurs create jobs. In fact, outside of government creating more bureaucracy, it is new private sector firms that create almost all new jobs. Likely we will be told its necessary to deploy programs to encourage new businesses and so public venture dollars, publicly supported training, and technical support for indigenous entrepreneurs.
Such a program, even if ISIL would stand aside eagerly awaiting the delivery of an entrepreneurial renaissance, cannot work. We are now discovering that in the United States the more courses we teach, the more business incubators we operate, and the more public and private venture money we make available are inversely correlated to the number of new firms being organized. Annual numbers of new American firms are down nearly thirty percent in the last few years. The absence of new companies helps explain the paucity of new jobs.
Apart from military action, there is little we can do to change the course of a region lost to ideological passions. Certainly we cannot expect entrepreneurship and new jobs to break out until there is a more secure political and macro-economic environment. Who would start a new business in the lands of ISIL's rampaging terror? Without new firms there will be no new jobs. And, without a free and open market, best supported by a free and open political system, there is no chance entrepreneurs will be creating jobs any time soon.
