A Benchmark of Progress, Electrical Grid Fails Iraqis

[unhappycamper]

Power lines from generators provided electricity to homes and shops in the Baghdad neighborhood of Kifah.


A Benchmark of Progress, Electrical Grid Fails Iraqis
By STEVEN LEE MYERS
Published: August 1, 2010

BAGHDAD — Ikbal Ali, a bureaucrat in a beaded head scarf, accompanied by a phalanx of police officers, quickly found what she was out looking for in the summer swelter: electricity thieves. Six black cables stretched from a power pole to a row of auto-repair shops, siphoning what few hours of power Iraq’s straining system provides.

“Take them all down,” Ms. Ali ordered, sending a worker up in a crane’s bucket to disentangle the connections. A shop owner, Haitham Farhan, responded mockingly, using the words now uttered across Iraq as a curse, “Maku kahraba” — “There is no electricity.”

From the beginning of the war more than seven years ago, the state of electricity has been one of the most closely watched benchmarks of Iraq’s progress, and of the American effort to transform a dictatorship into a democracy.

And yet, as the American combat mission — Operation Iraqi Freedom, in the Pentagon’s argot — officially ends this month, Iraq’s government still struggles to provide one of the most basic services.

Ms. Ali’s campaign against electricity theft — a belated bandage on a broken body — makes starkly clear the mixed legacy that America leaves behind as Iraq begins to truly govern itself, for better and worse.

[Greyhound]

1. More criminals allowed to walk away with their loot intact. K&R.

[Scruffy1]

2. This is so rediculous

After the first Iraq War the Iraqis managed to get their grid up and running in six months, even though it sustained more damage in that war. With all the billions squandered here its just beyond belief that they still have no juice. There are gas powered generators with no gas pipelines, a great shortage of mechanics to work on the system and endless graft from top to bottom. Any government that can't provide basic services is a failure.

[Orsino]

3. This story stops just short of saying...

..."basic services still not up to Saddam-era standards."