'Made in Iraq' labels headed for USA

Good stuff - maybe walmart can set up some factories there.

Setting up industry in Iraq is good for Iraq but I’m not so sure they’re ready for prime time. Seems that they would be better off if they made things for sale around the mideast...at least till they get it right.

I’d buy their stuff over anything made in China.

Might as well say “Made by Al Qaeda,” because after all, how would consumers know it wasn’t? I’m buying no food, no clothing, no toys... NOTHING is coming into my house that was made over there, thank you very much.

Probably safer than the stuff we buy from China...

Id buy an Iraqi Tabuk or Al Kadesiah rifle or a Tariq pistol

Hard to say since China is teaching the world how easy it is to poison us.

SAMOON!!!!

Thanks for posting, Kas! I watched the briefing with Brinkley and Minister Fawzi Hariri last night on cspan-2 ... it was SO impressive and hopeful. Paul Brinkley was outstanding, and Mr. Hariri is VERY sharp and articulate about their situation.

God bless them as they bring life in Iraq to some kind of economic stability and modernity.

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Just a small excerpt — the WHOLE article is VERY worthwhile, and I recommend it highly.

http://www.defenselink.mil/transcripts/transcript.aspx?transcriptid=4032

DoD News Briefing with Secretary Gordon England, Paul Brinkley and Minister Fawzi Hariri at the Pentagon, Arlington, Va.

To see briefing slides click here or go to www.defenselink.mil/news/Sep2007/taskforceslides.pdf

GORDON ENGLAND (deputy secretary of Defense): So good afternoon, everyone. It’s a pleasure for me to be here. If we haven’t met, I’m Gordon England, the deputy secretary of Defense.

I’m pleased to have with me today Mr. Paul Brinkley. I expect most of you know Paul. He is the Deputy Undersecretary of Defense for Business Transformation. But more importantly, Paul is the director of the Task Force to Improve the Business and Stability Operations in Iraq.

I’m also pleased to introduce Minister Fawzi Hariri. He is the minister of Industry and Materials from the government of Iraq, and he is visiting with us today. And Minister Hariri, welcome to Washington.

And Paul Brinkley and the minister will be providing you an update on their efforts to restart Iraqi factories and to get Iraqis back to work.

By way of background, this effort started over a year ago — in fact, June of last year, 2006 — and it’s now a multi-partnership effort within the Department of Defense, with the Department of State, the Treasury Department and the government of Iraq.

This partnership also includes the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the membership of the Department of Defense’s Defense Business Board.

Since this program began last year, measurable progress has been made. About 5,000 Iraqis are back to work in sustainable jobs, and as you will hear in a few moments, other factories are about to open, with more in the works.

Just last week there was an Iraqi business and investment conference, which was held in Dubai. That conference brought together Iraqi businesses and government officials with foreign corporations.

The objective of conferences like these is to encourage foreign direct investment in Iraqi companies and to increase the demand for Iraqi goods. The conference had about 600 attendees, with about 75 potential investors.

Now the efforts of Paul’s team have been and are an important dimension of General Petraeus’s plan for Iraq.

All societies need sustainable jobs. People need to be employed to have income to provide for their families, and Iraq is no different. This has been and will continue to be hard work, but it is important that we move Iraq from the front pages to the business pages of our newspapers.

Now I’ll let Paul and Minister Hariri give you their perspective.

Paul, Mr. Minister, please?

MR. BRINKLEY: It’s a very great honor today to share a podium with my colleague His Excellency Minister Fawzi Hariri from the government of Iraq. We’ve worked in close partnership with his ministry over the past year’s time, and as Secretary England indicated, have made significant progress in our efforts to restore sustained employment to the people of Iraq. And we’ll talk about exactly what that progress is, what the challenges are — and there are challenges — and how we’re addressing those challenges going forward.

Specifically today, some points I want to highlight are we’ve had a material impact — and by material impact I mean people working in factories today who were not working prior to our collaborative efforts with the minister of Industry on 17 operations in Iraq. Those range from heavy industrial operations that manufacture complex goods, industrial goods, vehicles to factories that employ predominantly women doing things like manufacturing clothing and weaving carpet, and they range all over the country. And I’ll walk through some graphs with you here.

Our efforts in Iraq have three primary focus areas. The first is — and this was the beginning of our undertakings last summer — to enable joint contracting command in an initiative called Iraqi First to award contracts to Iraqi businesses that are currently being awarded in the region for material goods, services that are needed to sustain our physical presence there in Iraq today.

A year ago very little was falling to Iraqi businesses; today we’ve registered and awarded contracts to over 3,000 private Iraqi businesses, and last month over $180 million in contract awards were given to Iraqi businesses. That is a significant economic stimulus.

This is done in partnership with Major General Darrell Scott (sp) of Joint Contracting Command for Iraq and Afghanistan. He estimates that has generated employment in access of 50,000 Iraqi workers. That is a key focal area for the task force’s effort.

The second area is to partner with the minister of industry to reinvigorate and to restore employment where it has been lost, in the industrial base of Iraq. We’ve shared statistics on this before. We’ve shared statistics on unemployment in Iraq, which is rampant and a major contributor, in the opinion of our commanders and in the opinion of our Iraqi counterparts, a major contributor to instability in the country today.

There’s no human population in the world that can withstand high levels of unemployment. By high levels of unemployment and underemployment, I’m talking in excess of 50 percent. There’s no human population in the world that can withstand that level of economic distress and not experience attendant violence, unrest, sympathy with violent actors.

This is what our commanders have encountered. This is why this effort is so important to the Department of Defense. As our commanders adjust force posture to address the kinetic needs of the operations in Iraq, our ability to support that with economic development that brings a reward to areas where stability exists is absolutely critical to enabling defense forces, be they U.S. defense forces or Iraqi defense forces, to establish and sustain security. I’m going to just go through some slides very quickly if we can bring those up.

The first is a review of our efforts with joint contracting command, showing the progress we’ve made over the past year in generating and awarding business to private industry in Iraq. Much of the focus is always on our large efforts with the ministry on state- owned industry. But this is also a major part of what we’re undertaking in Iraq, and we believe it’s a significant stimulus for economic growth.

Next slide. We placed a team in November of manufacturing experts, accountants, certified public accountants, business consultants in Iraq, working with the ministry of industry, in support of his vision to assess the factory operations in Iraq. Much was written about factories in Iraq. These factories are old; they’re out of date; they should be shut down.

There are factories all over the world that are in no worse condition than factories in Iraq that currently build and manufacture products that the world market consumes.

We believe passionately that there’s no excuse for factories in Iraq to be sitting idle when the global economy is capable of absorbing — and the Iraqi economy is capable of absorbing the goods and services that those factories produce. We assessed over 70 of these operations, and you can see the geographic distribution is very wide across Iraq.

Next slide.

We’ve impacted, I’ve said to you, as of today 17 — materially impacted — and that’s a conservative number. We’ve very conservative in what we announce in terms of factories that have been impacted.

The numbers are actually — could be claimed to be higher, but we’re extremely conservative when we say a factory has been impacted. That means people have gone back to work and it’s unquestionable; you can take a camera in there, you can videotape, and there are workers working who were not working before. They’re being extremely conservative in this claim.

Next slide.

Those 17 factories were impacted without a single dollar of U.S. government investment. We did not receive any funding appropriations from the U.S. Congress for restarting factories: buying the material, buying spare parts, restoring equipment, training workers. We didn’t receive anything until June of this year.

In the FY ‘07 supplemental budget, $50 million was appropriated to accelerate our efforts. In partnership with the minister of Industry, we have now identified where we’re going to grant a portion of that 50 million to over 30 factories, which include major industrial operations.

So when you think about the 17 factories that have been restarted, that hasn’t been done with U.S. taxpayer money buying things for those factories. That’s just been done through the creative efforts of our team in partnership with our command, in partnership with the ministry to drive demand to factories where demand is needed, to identify alternative sources of working capital where they can be identified, and that’s how those 17 have been impacted to date.

What the $50 million enables us to do is accelerate this effort, and through investments in small amounts — machine maintenance, tooling, training, in some cases raw material — we expect to see an acceleration of this effort through the end of this year.

*snip*

MIN. HARIRI:

Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you, Paul, and my sincere appreciation and thanks for the introduction by Undersecretary Gordon.

Iraq’s industry, as probably most of you well know, was the basis through which sustained the former regime for many, many years. Even during the years of boycott and sanctions, it was the basis which fixed most of the broken elements of that regime after the liberation of Kuwait.

And Iraq’s industry actually happens to be the fourth- largest employer in the country at the present time, after the security services, education and health. And today on its books, it employs over 190,000 people up and down the country.

The infrastructure of the industry in Iraq spans over six specific sectors that uniquely come together to provide a totally capable and independent industry that very rarely requires assistance and support from foreign interventions and foreign supplies. And that is what sustained the former regime.

The sectors of construction, engineering both heavy and light, food and drugs, textiles, chemicals and petrochemicals and, of course, R&D — those six sectors include over 60 facilities up and down the country. These state-owned enterprises or companies have a total of 240 factories that were operational pre-2003, fully operational in — to the extent of 70 to 80 percent productivity levels.

After the liberation of Iraq on the 9th of April, at that particular point, just like the rest of the country, the industry of Iraq came to a standstill. Much of the infrastructure was affected through a military campaign. The rest of it was severely damaged by looting and other popular unrest that took place immediately after the fall of the former regime.

It is to the detriment (sic) of the employees and the senior management of industry at that time that they quickly came back together and reorganized the infrastructure of the various companies and brought back most of the senior management to try and manage and secure whatever facility that were left.

Today, out of the 240 factories, over 175 are operational. The present production levels are between 10 to 30 percent of the designed capacity of these facilities. It does sound low, but in real terms, they started from zero, and with almost zero funding throughout this period, so far as the government is concerned.

The area that affected the industry, just like it affected other aspects of employment and life in Iraq, were some of the decisions that were taken back then in 2003 by the open border policy, which flooded Iraq with cheap goods that really resulted in the direct suffocation of the existing industry that had previously only operated in what was a monopolized market.

Iraqi government’s policy is to move the industry from the state- owned, monopolized economy into a free market economy. And basically that means moving everything that’s state-owned into the private sector. We believe that is the right way to go.

Those 17 factories were impacted without a single dollar of U.S. government investment. We did not receive any funding appropriations from the U.S. Congress for restarting factories: buying the material, buying spare parts, restoring equipment, training workers.

Those 17 factories were impacted without Chuck Schumers support, though he’ll be there to take credit.

Good news for the entire middle east, folks setting an example of working in a free market, and being rewarded for their work. I’d buy.

Your very welcome. Thanks for the transcripts from the DOD defense link

I’d be willing to try

I wish the American people knew how much hard and positive work is being done there ... we never hear about it, nor will we .. unless we search it out for ourselves.

Mark, Sean, Tony ~~ how can this positive news get out there ?

This sounds like the clothing contract from Mosul that ended up in TN — it’s a start.

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MR. BRINKLEY: I think we — and this has been beaten to death — ((( I NEVER heard about it til I saw the briefing. )))

one company placed some orders for some clothing sourced out of a factory in Mosul, and that was a great news story — and again, a mid- size retailer.

When we began this effort, there was more energy, a sense of optimism. The — certainly the state of play in public opinion in the United States has an influence over willingness to engage in that type of activity with Iraq, and I have no intent — I wouldn’t mislead on that.

They can also export oil. Iraq is considered the country that is second after Saudi Arabia in proven reserves...

I’m more than ready to buy Iraqi, just as I also favor Israeli products over other countries products. (Though I buy American first).
The vallet is a powerful weapon. Avoid stuff from the enemy and support our allies and would be allies.

Supporting local Iraqi economy is a way to fight against the terrorists.

I’d deliberately buy products made in Iraq.

Who are you fooling. Read Paul A. Brinkley’s entire 4 Sept 07 transcript and you will see that a reporter was clever enough to catch Brinkley in a lie and noted that he has spent over $70,000,000.00 to date on his economic initiatives—not as you depict. This $70million was spent through large defense subcontractors and frequent executive travel junkets that Brinkley financed with US tax dollars. Shame on you. Is Starwise just a psuedoname for Paul Brinkley?

Interesting level of venom for a newbie.

I posted what was publicly accessible.

God bless our troops.