Return Of Power Brightens Iraqis

USA Today ^ | 10/8/2003 | Cesar G. Soriano

[Ex-Dem]

BAGHDAD

[Ex-Dem]

Electricity has its downside. "Now the children will not leave the house," says Lamia Younis, a mother of four. "They just sit at home all day watching satellite TV."

Now that sounds like familiar :).

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[MoJo2001]

Woohoo Ping!!

[Ex-Dem]

Ooops, make that "sounds familiar."

[FreedomPoster]

Coalition officials are optimistic they can keep the lights on because sabotage and looting has dropped and electricity output is near prewar levels. Cooling temperatures have also helped. "The power situation has not been this good since before the Kuwait war,"

Typically anti-Administration biased writing? If it's back to pre-Kuwait War levels, I've got to assume it's better than pre-Iraq II War levels.

[Pest]

Whoa! Someone's actually reporting that good things are happening in Iraq? Maybe the accusations of media bias are starting to sink in.

[Sunshine Sister]

The last paragraph of this article makes me sick. Nothing can be written about Iraq, apparently, that does not come with a complaint. I'm so tired of that!

[VOA]

bump

[vbmoneyspender]

But the latest war and widespread looting afterward devastated the power grid, plunging much of the country into darkness. Frequent sabotage and looting slowed progress in restoring power. Until recently, most homes and businesses in Baghdad had partial electricity service. Power would be on for several hours and then off for a similar amount of time.

The reporters who write this stuff are making some progress in figuring out the truth. But they really are still pretty ill-informed. Prior to our defeating the Baathists, Hussein used to divert all available power to Baghdad. He would then keep certain areas of the city lit around the clock (such as the area around the Palestine Hotel where foreign reporters stayed) whereas other areas (such as Sadr City where the Shiites live) would get hardly any power. Outside of Baghdad, Hussein loyalists in the Sunni triangle got power, whereas everywhere else Iraqis had to make do with whatever intermittent power Hussein's thugs decided to parcel out to them. And if some particular area of Iraq incurred the Baathists' disfavor, that area could count on the small amount of power they were receiving being cutoff as a form of punishment and control. The knuckleheads in the press, however, assumed that because they were getting power 24 hours a day everyone in the country was being treated exactly like they were.

When our troops came and took over, they immediately ended this system where Baghdad and areas sympathetic to Hussein were being given power to the detriment of other areas of the country. Instead, our troops made sure that whatever power was available was evenly parceled out through all of Iraq. The reporters in Iraq either didn't understand this or refused to acknowledge it. Either way, for anyone who wasn't living in the Palestine Hotel or the al-Rashid district of Baghdad, the power situation instantly became better once our people took over and the situation has steadily improved each day since then.