The newspapers are full of happy news from Iraq, with U.S. military leaders saying that some of our soldiers may be able to come home in the fall. Might the long-term prognosis for Iraq be positive?
According to the CIA Factbook, Iraq has 28 million people and a birthrate of 31 new babies for each 1,000 population, which translates to nearly 1 million new babies every year (compare to the U.S. with 14 births per 1,000 and the U.S. has a much higher death rate) and a very rapid rate of population growth.
What are these new Iraqis going to do with themselves? With a literacy rate of 74 percent, they are not going to compete in the global workforce with the Chinese (literacy rate of 91 percent plus some of the world’s better universities). Watching Western and Chinese oil companies pump dinosaur blood out of the sand is not going to be a major source of new employment.
Two scenarios seem most likely. Suppose that oil becomes cheap again. Iraq is already having trouble importing enough food to make its people happy (see this article where Iraqis blame Americans for the fact that food is expensive). As the population grows and we’re still over there, it will be American taxpayers who have to pay to feed all of those new Iraqis.
Suppose that oil grows in price to keep pace with Iraqi population growth and our puppet government over there distributes all of the oil revenue uniformly. Iraqis will join Palestinians and Saudi Arabians in not having to work in order to obtain food, shelter, and clothing. With Palestinians and Saudis, who share a common Arab culture with the Iraqis, quite a few idle young men have decided to fill their days by taking up arms (or bombs) against the West. Our Islamic antagonists have not come from poor regions where daily survival is a struggle, they’ve mostly come from places where all of the necessities are taken care of and the only daily challenge that young men face is how to occupy their time.
One might argue that the solution is to build schools and educate Iraqis to a competitive world standard. Unfortunately we’ve tried that here in the U.S. and, despite bleeding taxpayers white to support the world’s most expensive schools, we don’t seem to be succeeding.
Let’s cut and run from Iraq. No matter how bad it is now, one of the world’s highest birthrates coupled with idleness is going to make it a lot worse in the future.