| Submit your comments on this article |
| Iraq |
| Power Flickers in Baghdad |
| 2006-10-24 |
| BAGHDAD, Oct. 23, 2006 — Everybody knows the bad news: In September, the lights were on in Baghdad for around four hours a day. One study has October’s levels so far at 2.4, the lowest since the invasion. A lot of Iraqi public opinion runs on rumors, and those with their ears pricked will tell you that after three-plus years and billions of reconstruction dollars, there’s a sneaking suspicion out in town that the U.S., who’s been putting men in orbit for four decades, could have had Baghdad twinkling like Times Square years ago if they wanted to. The conspiracy theory goes that the Americans have, insidiously, chosen not to. That they’re keeping Iraqis down, man. Either that, or we just don’t care. So the big question at a recent Iraqi media roundtable on electricity, hosted by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ Gulf Regional Division, was -- translated roughly from the Arabic -- “It’s been three years and $4 billion. What gives?” Leaning slowly forward to take it was Al Herman, a senior consultant with the State Department’s Iraq Reconstruction Management Office (IRMO) who works in Iraq with the Ministry of Electricity on project management and system planning. Herman has rebuilt and rehabbed electricity grids in 36 countries in 30 years -- if he just didn’t care, he’d probably have retired by now. And if he was evil (colleagues have nicknamed him “The Prince of Darkness,” but that’s just blackout humor), well, he’d probably have gotten himself an easier job. But he sure had an answer. “Nine of the transmission lines bringing power into Baghdad have been interdicted. Blown up. Down and out.” If those lines were up and operating, Herman said, Baghdad would have in excess of 12 hours of power per day. “The minister and his people have tried on numerous occasions to repair these lines. They keep getting attacked, killed, kidnapped and threatened.” Security trumps a lot in Baghdad. And as far as infrastructure targets go, the transmission towers and wires that bring power into the capital make fairly juicy ones. They’re exposed. They’re pretty fragile. A tower, Herman explained, is easy to find, easy to knock down and not too hard to put back up. The bad guys can demonstrate their disruptive abilities, keep MoE manpower tied up and keep Baghdad dark without, say, taking out an entire power plant – which would make it spectacularly obvious that they, and not U.S. or Iraqi incompetence, are to blame for the lights being out. “It’s a game of cat and mouse,” Herman said. “We’re hoping over the next few months that we will be able to repair most of these lines and get them up and operating. And we need the help of all Iraqis in keeping them up and operating.” But there’s more to the story than violence. Baghdad is also short on power because the rest of Iraq’s population is enjoying levels of electricity it’s never seen before. Electricity and politics do tend to function in tandem. A light switch may not care who’s flipping it, but the way infrastructure is distributed in a nation is a pretty reliable sign of where, well, where the power lies. Under Saddam Hussein, the lights in Baghdad were on all day and night. Favored Baathists were even allowed air conditioners and satellite TVs. Outside the capital? They got the scraps. But just as the new Iraq constitution has devolved much political power away from the capital, reconstruction efforts have focused on making sure the spoils of power are spread around too. So even as demand for electricity – those now-legal air-conditioners and satellite TVs, and the momentum of consumerism – has risen steadily since the invasion, three-quarters of Iraqis have twice as much power as they did before the war. “Under Saddam Hussein, Baghdad pulled its power away from the rest of Iraq. We’ve gone to a policy to try and equitably distribute that power across the country,” Army Col. Jon Christensen, GRD’s electricity sector director, said. “So now, outside of Baghdad, they have gone from zero in some cases, up to twelve or fourteen hours of power a day.” Overall, the GRD has started 520 electricity-related projects and completed 220 of them so far. The peak generation capacity of Iraq’s nationwide network is now 4,500 megawatts -- still short of the goal of 6,000 megawatts, buthigher than the pre-war levels of 4,200. And much better-distributed, by much better equipment. “Unfortunately,” said the colonel, “Baghdad has paid the price for that.” So what’s next? In the short term, Col. Christensen focuses his smaller projects in specific areas after they have been cleared by Baghdad Security Plan operations – moving as quickly as possible to take advantage of the drop in violence after an operation moves through (and trying to demonstrate to citizens that U.S. and Iraqi officials have more on their minds than checkpoints and house searches). And Herman has plans to “harden” the transmission towers, along with other measures, to make the “weak links” of Baghdad’s power chain a little harder to snap. But the longer-term vision, Herman said, is for IRMO and the MoE to spend 2007 putting Baghdad on its own power footing, with more generation and more facilities in the so-called “Baghdad Ring,” so that there’s no chain to break. “We don’t want the over-reliance on the grid that Baghdad has now,” he said. As with just about everything else the U.S. is trying to do in Iraq, IRMO, USAID and GRD are fast turning the job of building, maintaining, and fueling an Iraqi electricity system worthy of the 21st century over to the Iraqis. GRD expects to complete its remaining 300 construction projects in the next year or two. USAID, after contributing 1,292 megawatts of generation (half from new plants and half from rehabilitated ones) to this point, will devote its efforts for the next few years to training Iraqi workers and contractors to maintain and repair modern turbine generation systems that they haven’t seen before. Although Herman likes what he’s seen in the MoE and its engineers so far. “When they go out and repair transmission lines, they do a marvelous job, even compared to what we do in the United States. They are actually quicker at recovering from blackouts than we are in the United States,” he said. “They have experience in this.” The future, the Prince of Darkness said, “looks brighter.” But bringing twenty-four hours of power to all 18 provinces will take “anywhere from $20-30 billion over the next seven years,” and with the U.S. no longer budgeting for new construction, that money will have to come from the Iraqis. Even if the security situation were to improve overnight – “If you can promise me no one will come and blow up the transmission lines, I can promise you we’ll get power into Baghdad,” Herman said at one point -- Iraqis who may have expected miracles when the U.S. arrived in March 2003 are going to have to settle for the best we can do in the time we’ve had. In the reality we found here. “What you need to understand,” Herman told the journalists, “is that the $4 billion that we have spent on electricity here in Iraq in the three years has done nothing more than what I would call kick-starting the system.” “You don’t rebuild an electric system as bad as this one was, in a short period of time.” Turns out electricity in Iraq is pretty much like, well, like everything else in Iraq. Held hostage in Baghdad. Better in the rest of the country. A long way and a lot of work from reaching first-world standards, but all in all, far from hopeless. Yet rapidly proving that even the mighty Americans will need the Iraqis to finish the job. Heck, it took us almost a decade just to put a man on the moon. Waaaaay too complicated for "The Evening News" |
| Posted by:Bobby |
| #27 Thankee for the Titty lotp peace be upon them »:-) |
| Posted by: RD 2006-10-24 23:03 |
| #26 Y'know, it's funny - I'm not used to playing second-fiddle in the pr0n thingy, lol. |
| Posted by: .com 2006-10-24 20:05 |
| #25 Lol - shhhhh! a5089 will be all over you! |
| Posted by: .com 2006-10-24 20:05 |
| #24 I'm afraid I have only the RB stock photos to offer, but I'll keep my eye out for others to add to the library. ;-) |
| Posted by: lotp 2006-10-24 20:03 |
| #23 We all need a chance to lighten up a bit. Amen. Long hard slog ahead. I've already made my points in, oh, about 6 or 7 thousand different ways, lol, so no use in belaboring it further on every thread every day. Now I just wanna sit back, snark, appreciate others posts, ogle stuff, spit a little to keep up my aim, and flow with the go. :-) |
| Posted by: .com 2006-10-24 20:02 |
| #22 We all need a chance to lighten up a bit. And as this article points out, sex is always on the male mind .... True story from the early 1970s. I was meeting my fiance's grandmother for the first time. A proper Lady, she was, and quite intimidating. Until, in a discussion of the hippy movement, she leaned forward and said, "Sex, sex, sex. You young people think you've invented it. I've forgotten more about sex than you all have learned so far! And when I later saw photos of her in her beautiful youth in the '20s, I could believe it! |
| Posted by: lotp 2006-10-24 19:42 |
| #21 I did not expect that from you, lotp. Appropriate, though. ;-) |
| Posted by: trailing wife 2006-10-24 19:38 |
| #20 Ship - I'm jealous. I've just been given marching orders to drop a few and get ship-shape, lol. Lotta sweat betwixt here 'n there. lotp - Heh - stock photo. I have better, lol, but I'm no longer on line so you'll hafta take my word for it. a5089 can prolly swamp us both. :-) |
| Posted by: .com 2006-10-24 19:34 |
| #19 for .com and y'all of like mindedness: |
| Posted by: boobs for the boys (lotp) 2006-10-24 19:12 |
| #18 I'm sorry, lh, I've sworn off this stuff. Good for you. I've lost 30 pounds and have a new cheerful outlook on life. I can eat anything I want, as long as I don't cook it. LOL! We're in deep.... Say Doooooooooom! |
| Posted by: Shipman 2006-10-24 19:09 |
| #17 I'm sorry, lh, I've sworn off this stuff. How 'bout them boobs, eh? Lol. |
| Posted by: .com 2006-10-24 17:54 |
| #16 Personally, I think an attack on Iran is going to need boots on the ground, and so cant really be done while we're on Iraq (or till weve gone much farther in terms of expanding the army, which means years, which amounts to the same thing) Hold on. You think we've taught the Iraqis, who fought the Iranians to a standstill with Soviet equipment and tactics, nothing? You don't think U. S. air, naval and intel support might make a teeny difference? You don't think an action in Iran would be a whole lot more fun to watch if the Iraqis did the bootwork while we did the rest? No, I say if Iran supplied Iraq with the tiniest causus belli, we could have a lot of fun now. If there were any Jacksonian Iraqis. |
| Posted by: Nimble Spemble 2006-10-24 17:47 |
| #15 "the dismantling of the militias, woohoo, it's hard to say where to begin when praising the Iraqi Arab" Youre an Iraqi Shiite Arab living in Baghdad. Every day Al Qaeeda types come to kill your neighbors, torture your neighbors, blow up your houses of worship, your markets, etc. A bunch of guys who are like you, some of whom you know, who follow a guy who defied the old regime, say theyre going to protect your neighborhood, and maybe go after the AQ types in their own areas. But some suit from the govt, whose forces have not managed to protect you, and his foreign pals, whos forces have also not managed to protect you (and for all you know are going to be gone in a year anyway) tell you that you should want these friendly protectors disarmed, cause, I dunno, "Guns kill" or something like that? What would you say? Id bet it would a variant on "f*** you". We're not the only country, or the only civ, with "Jacksonians" |
| Posted by: liberalhawk 2006-10-24 17:22 |
| #14 Personally, I think an attack on Iran is going to need boots on the ground, and so cant really be done while we're on Iraq (or till weve gone much farther in terms of expanding the army, which means years, which amounts to the same thing) I realize strategic views differ. But, if you think that the violence would end with the end of the sponsors (I tend to think youre right there) then what does that say about the depth of the insurgency in Iraq? If the Shiites are really dead set against us, than Id think they would be hell to deal with, even without the shaped charges and other goodies the Sadrists get from Iran. If the Sadrist insurgency melts away without outside assistance, Id say that suggests that most ordinary in the street Shiites arent so far gone, that maybe the lions share of them ARE interested in the new Iraq that the admin talks about. In which case Im not sure they arent deserving of things improving. |
| Posted by: liberalhawk 2006-10-24 17:16 |
| #13 Lol - you take it wrong. I'm not for withdrawal. Funny thing is, much of the speculation you and I could engage in would become moot with 2 actions: removal of the Mullahs and a long-overdue showdown with the Saudis. Syria would go off-line rather quickly as a source of grief both in Iraq as well as Leb. They are so addicted to Mad Mullah Money they'd probably implode. Both sides of the Arab sectarian bullshit that ails Iraq would suddenly be sponsorless - and dependent upon the successful economic development of the country, not their usual centuries-old blood feud. It would be interesting to see if they were finally capable of getting it - since the money flow for fighting would substantially dry up - or if they, the Iraqi Arabs of both flavors, are just too stupid to live. Anyway, with those two de-funding actions, the entire M.E. equation could be altered forever and the myth of "stability", which only favors the asshat situation prevalent since it was carved up into the present mess, finally flushed. Ah well. It would be interesting. |
| Posted by: .com 2006-10-24 16:44 |
| #12 Ok, it least youre consistent and make logical sense. If it werent for the Kurds, youd be for withdrawl, I take it. As sympathetic with the Kurds as I am, I dont think we can maintain an indefinite occupation of the Rest of Iraq, with no hope for improvement in the lives of IRaqi arabs, just to help the Kurds. It costs us too much - in lives, in the use of force that could be used elsewhere, in money, in war weariness at home (that should be conserved for elsewhere) and in repuation abroad. (note none of the above means I AGREE with you on what Iraqi arabs deserve - just that I dont care to rehash that now) |
| Posted by: liberalhawk 2006-10-24 16:29 |
| #11 Lol - Oh yeah, they've surely proven they deserve that "improve your lives bit". What with the Unity Govt and the rejection of foreign influence and interference by both the Sunnis and the Shia - and the dismantling of the militias, woohoo, it's hard to say where to begin when praising the Iraqi Arabs. Lol. Were it not for the Kurds, well... Lesson learned. |
| Posted by: .com 2006-10-24 16:23 |
| #10 "We'll know that Maliki & Co are semi-serious when they ban all motorized vehicular traffic and cell phones - permanently" damn. that'll show them that we came to improve their lives. OTOH, Al Gore might like the ban motorized vehicles permanently part ;) |
| Posted by: liberalhawk 2006-10-24 16:11 |
#9 Their parts must come from the real Prince of Darkness. |
| Posted by: Shipman 2006-10-24 12:02 |
| #8 RWV - :-) Proof that one monkey typing long enough will finally... accidents do happen, lol. |
| Posted by: .com 2006-10-24 10:54 |
| #7 If any of these worthless f**ks ever put in an honest workday, they wouldn't have so much energy to be up all night killing each other. Maybe some of their broken infrastructure would get fixed. And, if they worked all day fixing something, they wouldn't be so eager to let some numbskull blow it up at night. The best thing to do is abandon these worthless shits. Let them figure out how to take care of their sandpile. Maybe they'll get it righted by say 2310. |
| Posted by: SpecOp35 2006-10-24 10:27 |
| #6 Arabs. It doesn't matter. If you build it, they will come - and blow it up. Even if they had the sense not to self-fuck by blowing it up, they'd tear down the power lines and steal the copper - and complain about the outage. Thanks,.com. That is the most trenchant and incisive analysis of the ME that I have ever read. Made my day. |
| Posted by: RWV 2006-10-24 10:27 |
| #5 Heh, don't you know how to short out a live line? :-) |
| Posted by: .com 2006-10-24 09:26 |
| #4 If the power was on 24/7, the number of people stealing copper would gradually decline. |
| Posted by: Bobby 2006-10-24 09:23 |
| #3 We'll know that Maliki & Co are semi-serious when they ban all motorized vehicular traffic and cell phones - permanently. These two modern conveniences appears to be essential for any significant level of killing to continue. They don't need them. Mo got along without them, so that should be good enough for these clowns, too. Taking the ankle express to "war" and being reduced to shouting strike me as apropos to these "warriors". |
| Posted by: .com 2006-10-24 09:14 |
| #2 I'd say Baghdad hasn't been deserving of power lately. Let the f*ckers build their IEDs in the dark. I'd keep the power off in Sadr City as a message |
| Posted by: Frank G 2006-10-24 09:05 |
| #1 Arabs. It doesn't matter. If you build it, they will come - and blow it up. Even if they had the sense not to self-fuck by blowing it up, they'd tear down the power lines and steal the copper - and complain about the outage. Arab society, using symptoms as the defining criteria, runs on rumors and fantasies and sectarian hate and blood feuds and slights, whether real or imagined. Were it not for the ideology and Sharia Law of Islam, they would have disappeared from the world centuries ago. Expecting anything but duplicity and blame and violence, whether fed by sectarian hate or romantic jihadi fantasy or the most amazing collection of misogynistic and misanthropic lies ever assembled under one tent, is for the dupes and symps of the MSM, the diplodink accommodating appeasers, and the Stalinist and Gaullist and ChiCom triangulating foreign policy wonks of the enemies of freedom. |
| Posted by: .com 2006-10-24 08:52 |