Today, the Energy Report of UPI, describes further improvement in Iraq’s electricity generation. It is up 14% above a year ago and that was above pre-invasion levels. Saddam Hussein used electricity like most of Iraq’s assets to reward supporters and punish opponents. Thus Baghdad had electricity nearly 24 hours per day while Shia areas had none. A 2006 report was pessimistic although positive items could still be found. For example: According to the Brookings Institution’s Iraq Index, the number of telephone subscribers in Iraq is greater than 7 million, well over the estimated prewar level of 833,000 subscribers. More than 200,000 Iraqis now have Internet subscriptions, compared to just a few thousand subscribers before the war. The pre-war electrical generation levels seem to depend on the politics of the source, ranging from 5000 megawatts to 4400 before invasion.
What about the prognosis for improvement now ? Michael Yon posts a Barry McCaffrey report. McCaffrey was opposed to the war so this should be free of any pro-Bush bias.
There is good news.
Al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) has been defeated at a tactical and operational level in Baghdad and Anbar Province and is trying to re-constitute in the north and along the Syrian frontier.
And bad news.
There is no functional central Iraqi Government. Incompetence, corruption, factional paranoia, and political gridlock have paralyzed the state. The constitution promotes bureaucratic stagnation and factional strife. The budgetary process cannot provide responsive financial support to the military and the police—nor local government for health, education, governance, reconstruction, and transportation.
He believes that we have another 18 months to get the Iraqi Army and Police up to speed so we can start to draw down our forces. The most serious error the Bush Administration has made this far, in my opinion, is the failure to expand the Army. McCaffrey has some serious things to say about this:
Our recruiting campaign is bringing into the Army thousands of new soldiers (perhaps 10% of the annual input) who should not be in uniform. (Criminal records, drug use, moral waivers, non-high school graduates, pregnant from Basic Training and therefore non-deployable, lowest mental category, etc.) We are losing our combat experienced mid-career NCOs’ and Captains at an excessive rate. (ROTC DMG’s, West Pointers, Officers with engineering and business degrees, etc.) Their morale is high, they are proud of their service, they have enormous personal courage—however, they see a nation of 300 million people with only an under resourced Armed Forces at war. The US Army at 400,000 troops is too small to carry out the current military strategy. The active duty US Army needs to be 800,000 strong to guarantee US national security.
The leftwingers are all excited at this prospect of failure. I suspect few of them, if any, have been through basic training and have seen what the recruiters are capable of dredging up from the farms of Idaho. I have and can still remember a group of us in the barracks dragging a farm boy into the showers in the middle of the night and beating the s**t out of him while we scrubbed him down. We then set up a rotation to make his bunk and polish his boots to avoid the collective punishment that the military excels in doling out to establish team spirit. We need a bigger Army and a few less F 22 fighters would pay for a couple of well trained and equipped brigades.
Iraq was worth the cost, even if it proves that Arabs cannot govern themselves without tyrants. I think it will turn out alright but we need a bigger Army. Iraq is not a one-time thing. We will see other counter-insurgency campaigns for the rest of the century unless Islam finds the capacity for Reformation.
I recall an interview (I think NPR) with a power plant engineer right after the invasion. He was detailing how Iraq’s power plants were on the verge of collapse: Saddam did no maintenance. The US immediately shut a bunch down. We built some power plants in Iraq, but we built them to burn natural gas (I guess it was the quickest design for us to build). However, the Iraqis burn mostly oil, so these plants have to be serviced much more often when oil is used.