This argument may be “too nuanced” for the Obama White House and State Department spokeswoman Marie Harf, but Middle East unemployment isn’t that high.
Harf has been trying to make the case that a lack of jobs and good governance help explain why Muslims—though she wants to avoid the religious identity—are being drawn to terrorism.
Though she has been widely ridiculed for the claim, at least she didn’t blame it on a video, as the administration did right after the Benghazi attack.
But just how bad is unemployment in many of those Middle Eastern countries that have served as a breeding ground for the Islamic State terrorists and its sister organizations?
Some blame has been cast on Saudi Arabia, where the Wahhabi fundamentalist sect, which included Osama bin Laden, originated and has strong support. But the World Bank (for 2013) puts unemployment is Saudi Arabia at 5.7 percent, virtually the same as the U.S.
What about Afghanistan? Its unemployment rate is 8 percent, and Pakistan is even lower, at 5.1 percent—lower than the U.S. Bahrain is 7.4 percent, United Arab Emirates is 3.8 percent and Kuwait is 3.1 percent.
While Egypt was 12.7 percent in 2013, it was only 9 percent in 2010, before the Arab Spring exploded there.
Jordan’s unemployment is higher, 12.8 percent, but it has one of the better governments in the Middle East, and good governance was specifically cited by Harf as a way to limit attracting potential terrorists. And Turkey, with a 10 percent unemployment rate, is also politically stable. And even terrorist-state Iran, with a high 13.2 percent rate, is politically stable, even if we in the West don’t like its politics.
Of course, Harf might have cited the example of Yemen, which has had an unemployment rate of more than 17 percent for years. But, um, Obama specifically pointed to Yemen as a success story.
Yes, Iraq has one of the highest unemployment rates, 16 percent. But the Islamic State jihadis are headed there, not coming from there.
So while middle-eastern unemployment is, in many countries, higher than the U.S., it’s not much higher than we were just a few years ago, when the U.S. hit 10 percent. And some of the countries we think of as hotbeds of radicalism, like Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, have reasonably low unemployment levels.
The most ridiculous implication of Harf’s statement is that the president who has embarked on umpteen “summer or recoveries” and now “middle-class economics” in order to jumpstart one of the slowest economic recoveries in U.S. history is going to find a way to solve middle-eastern unemployment.
Ideology, and in this case religious ideology, creates jihadis and terrorists. But Obama and his State Department continue to think that the root cause of all evil is that government hasn’t done enough.