Business

Pentagon buying uniforms, vehicles made in Iraq

Wednesday, March 28, 2007 10:33 PM CDT

WASHINGTON (AP) - In an Iraq jobs program, the Pentagon has helped reopen three factories shuttered after the 2003 invasion, seeding the ground by buying uniforms and armored vehicles from two of them.

Reopening state-owned factories that produced everything from cement to buses for Saddam Hussein's regime is among efforts President Bush hopes will boost the economy and help salvage a violent Iraq. His strategy of increasing troops there to try to calm violence is meant to buy the Iraqi government time to move forward on reconciliation and reconstruction.

In a program started nearly a year ago, the Defense Department has reopened a large textile factory in Najaf by buying uniforms for Iraqi soldiers and police that the U.S. has been training, and has reopened a vehicle factory south of Baghdad by buying armored vehicles, said Paul Brinkley. He is deputy undersecretary of defense in charge of Pentagon business modernization efforts and has been running the program.

Officials helped find other customers for the third restarted factory, in Ramadi, which makes ceramic products the U.S. has no need for in Iraq,

Brinkley has been taking representatives from private industry in the United States and elsewhere to Iraq to encourage them to do business in the country.