U.S. drops Baghdad electricity reports

[babsbunny]

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-na-iraqpower27jul27,1,3088614.story?track=rss&ctrack=1&cset=true

The daily length of time that residents have power has dropped. The figure is considered a key indicator of quality of life.
By Noam N. Levey and Alexandra Zavis, Times Staff Writers
July 27, 2007

WASHINGTON -- As the Bush administration struggles to convince lawmakers that its Iraq war strategy is working, it has stopped reporting to Congress a key quality-of-life indicator in Baghdad: how long the power stays on.

Ryan Crocker, the U.S. ambassador to Iraq, told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee last week that Baghdad residents could count on only "an hour or two a day" of electricity. That's down from an average of five to six hours a day earlier this year.

But that piece of data has not been sent to lawmakers for months because the State Department, which prepares a weekly "status report" for Congress on conditions in Iraq, stopped estimating in May how many hours of electricity Baghdad residents typically receive each day.

[TomInTib]

1. Gee, that was easy.

Past appalling.

[Jim__]

2. It's a good thing that the surge is working.

Because nothing else in Iraq is. :sarcasm:

[burrowowl]

5. The surge cooked all the

transformers!

[Fridays Child]

3. They obstruct oversight at every level, and the only mystery is...

...WHY IN THE WORLD Congress isn't responding with the only viable, constitutionally-mandated safeguard against an unchecked executive: impeachment.

[draft_mario_cuomo]

4. Dems need to call * on this nt

[WCGreen]

6. Surge protectors....

[welshTerrier2]

7. Half of Baghdad Without Power for Ten Days

source: http://www.watchingamerica.com/azzaman000150.shtml

The Karkh side of Baghdad (West Baghdad) where nearly half of the city’s six million people live, has been without electricity for more than ten days. The Tigris River divides Baghdad into two parts - the Karkh and Rasafa (East Baghdad). Today, the supply of electricity to the city is far below what it was before the 2003-U.S. invasion.

Nationwide, electricity generation rates are also lower, with major cities and towns often suffering outages of over 20-hours. <skip>

Another man, Rijab Abdullah, said military operations by Iraqi and U.S. troops cause tremendous infrastructure damage in the areas they target. <skip>

It's hard to sell the official rhetoric regarding the outages to the public.

A man named Rasheed Zamel said, “according to statements from the ministries of the interior and defense, thousands of gunmen have been killed or detained during the latest military operations. We wonder then, who is it destroying the national grid if so many are being killed and captured?”