Sorry, y’all, about the sparse posting of late — darn that real-world job thing. I’ve spent last night, early morning and a good chunk of tonight logged into work and, frankly, I’m a little sick of my computer right now. That said, as a substitute for actual material, here’s a handful of links about this, that and the other.<\/p>\n
Bringing Power to the People<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n One of the most persistent myths about Iraq is that our efforts to improve the electrical system failed. That’s just plain wrong. The country’s in far better shape than it was under Saddam.<\/p>\n But freedom always has a cost: In this case, the demand for power soared after Saddam fell \u00e2\u20ac\u201d and crashed the grid. It’s been a long, hard fight to get it back up.<\/p>\n Iraq never had an adequate power grid. Under the Ba’athist regime, Baghdad might have enjoyed power 18 or 20 hours a day, but other cities got three or four. One of the first things we did was to distribute power more equitably. Baghdad gets less, so its residents complain \u00e2\u20ac\u201d but if you’re in almost any other Iraqi city, you’re far better off today than you were three years ago.<\/p>\n In the wake of the war, we faced two immediate problems:<\/p>\n * First: The grid was even more decrepit than the worst pessimists had suspected. Saddam never funded electrification adequately; spare-parts money from the Oil-For-Food program went to build palaces and monuments instead.<\/p>\n * Second: As soon as the borders opened, appliances flowed in, from refrigerators to air-conditioners to satellite dishes (the dishes are everywhere). Money came out from under a few million beds and the country went on a massive shopping spree that hasn’t ended. As soon as the Saddam-era system was exposed to “normal” demands, it crashed.<\/p>\n Nonetheless, power generation last July averaged 5,300 megawatts; the top pre-war peak was 4,300. Just now, output’s down to 3,900 to 4,200 megawatts\u00e2\u20ac\u201d because the system’s being serviced and upgraded to meet this summer’s demands.<\/p>\n Power matters. As one ranking official (who preferred not to be named) put it, “Power is the Iraqis’ No. 1 concern” and “the center of gravity” for our efforts. Power outages affect far more lives than terrorism does.<\/p>\n The insurgents and terrorists realize this. The progress to date has come despite frequent attacks on transmission lines and on the pipelines that fuel the power plants (another action that turns Iraqis against our mutual enemies).<\/p>\n […]<\/p>\n The challenge isn’t just power generation, either. Everything was decrepit, from sub-stations to the power lines themselves. We faced a daunting task. And our fellow Americans in Iraq have done a far better job than they’ve received credit for doing.<\/strong><\/p>\n We aren’t just fixing it all while the Iraqis watch, either. We couldn’t. The cost would be prohibitive, and rebuilding the entire power system was never our intention. Our goal was to jump-start the system, then teach Iraqis how to do it \u00e2\u20ac\u201d and more and more projects are now carried out by Iraqi firms and ministries, with U.S. officials offering only supervision and advice.<\/p>\n Iraqis won’t be fully content for years, of course. They desperately want to be part of the modern world \u00e2\u20ac\u201d and that’s going to take a long time. Meanwhile, they’re finding workarounds. Many Baghdad neighborhoods have chipped in to buy communal generators to provide reliable power to their homes. Not the perfect system, but it buys time for development.<\/p>\n Significant problems remain, no question about it. Iraq was a ruined country. But things are going far better than you’ve been told.<\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\n The emphasis above was added, and Ralph Peters calling out poor coverage by our media is nothing new. I’ll always happily link to columns by or involving him, as I’ve previously done here<\/a>, here<\/a> and here<\/a>. I’ll also happily plug my introduction to Peters, which was his somewhat-prescient novel, The War in 2020<\/em><\/a>. I first cracked that entertaining adventure in the gunner’s seat of an M1 while waiting on a gunnery range at Ft. Hood, travelling in the way-back machine to May of ’93.<\/p>\n Abbas claims al-Qaida is operating in Gaza<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n The Palestinian leader, Mahmoud Abbas, said yesterday that he believes al-Qaida has infiltrated the occupied territories and could further destabilise the region.<\/p>\n “We have indications about a presence of al-Qaida in Gaza and the West Bank. This is intelligence information. We have not yet reached the point of arrests,” Mr Abbas told Al Hayat, the London-based Arabic newspaper.<\/p>\n Later he added that Palestinian security forces had been given the task of heading off any extremist plots. “Our forces are trying with all available means to prevent them from arriving to carry out terrorist attacks in this region,” he said.<\/p>\n Israel’s acting prime minister, Ehud Olmert, said he was not surprised by the remarks.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Nor should anyone be surprised; stability in the world of Islam is not to the benefit of murderous extremists. For that matter, stability and progress among the Palestinians is not exactly a goal for the surrounding Arab states — a victimized Palestinian people allows allows the despotic states to misdirect the unrest of their people towards the supposed great and little satans of America and Israel.<\/p>\n