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Ralph Peters is a regular columnist with the New
York Post.
Register here for access to the Post's Online Edition.
 Bringing
Power To The People
Iraq's infrastructure better than it ever was...
[Ralph
Peters] 3/6/06
One of the
most persistent myths about Iraq is that our efforts to im
prove 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.
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Ralph
Peters is a retired Army officer and the author of 19 books,
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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. -one-
Ralph
Peters is in Iraq on assignment for The New York Post.
Ralph Peters'
latest book is New
Glory: Expanding America's Global Supremacy
This
piece first appeared in the New York Post
copyright 2006 - NY Post
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