Shek

New York Post
March 2, 2006

Bringing Power To The People

By Ralph Peters

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.

But freedom always has a cost: In this case, the demand for power soared after Saddam fell — and crashed the grid. It's been a long, hard fight to get it back up.

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 — but if you're in almost any other Iraqi city, you're far better off today than you were three years ago.

In the wake of the war, we faced two immediate problems:

* 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.

* 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.

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— because the system's being serviced and upgraded to meet this summer's demands.

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.

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).

Plus, as American managers frankly admit, Iraqis never had a culture of maintenance. Under Saddam, the attitude of employees toward state property echoed the Soviet Union: Nobody owned anything, so nobody cared about anything. You couldn't get a worker to change the oil. Iraq's developing better attitudes — but it takes time.

We also made some early misjudgments — for one, overestimating Iraqis' ability to manage sophisticated technologies. We brought in gas turbines whose control systems were beyond the local engineers' technical skills. (One U.S. official tells of showing computer models to a middle-aged Iraqi who broke down in tears as he realized his professional life had been wasted under Saddam — his country had missed the entire microchip revolution.)

Since then, we've simplified whatever we could. Still, as Corps of Engineers civilian David Leach puts it, "The industry standard moved so far [since Saddam took power] that even the least-sophisticated systems now available can be a challenge for Iraqis." (Leach, by the way, was the corps' New York metro-area engineer before volunteering for Iraq — and he's a veteran of the 9/11 recovery effort.)

Col. John Medeiros, an Air Force civil engineer, is convinced that "Iraqis want to succeed," and that "the job's getting done." He's impressed by the local thirst for knowledge after the information drought under Saddam. As for developing competent Iraqi managers, he calls it "escaping 'Insh'Allah' " — that is, the habit of shrugging off personal responsibility for getting a tough job done.

Medeiros points out another overlooked factor about our efforts: Many of our projects have been long-term; some major installations are only now coming on line (despite the challenges, 130 projects have been completed).

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.

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 — and more and more projects are now carried out by Iraqi firms and ministries, with U.S. officials offering only supervision and advice.

Iraqis won't be fully content for years, of course. They desperately want to be part of the modern world — 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.

Significant problems remain, no question about it. Iraq was a ruined country. But things are going far better than you've been told.

Still, painting an idealized picture would be as dishonest as the left's claims that everything in Iraq's been a massive failure. We did get some things downright wrong. So I'll give the last word to Vicky Wayne of the Project and Contracting Office, an outfit working beside the Corps of Engineers' Gulf Region Division.

Vicky's a volunteer from San Francisco who took an 80 percent pay cut to help out in Iraq. "We set out on grand reconstruction projects," she said, speaking of our early missteps, "but Iraqis have no long-term visions. They wanted short-term relief. We could have done quick, easy things that would have mitigated the dissatisfaction." She also believes that the Iraqi expats the administration empowered "did terrible damage."

She's dead right. But we've made great progress, anyway. Because of magnificent Americans like Vicky Wayne.

Ralph Peters is on assignment in Iraq for The Post.

__________________
"So little pains do the vulgar take in the investigation of truth, accepting readily the first story that comes to hand." Thucydides 1.20.3

Anon

Power to the people?

LOL...what are you sir, a black panther?

Shek

Have you ever seen Ralph Peters? He would scarcely be confused with a Blank Panther.