Let’s say — just, you know, as a hypothetical — that the U.S. has a difficult time restoring electricity for residents of Baghdad. As Tony Snow famously observed, it’s getting up to 130 degrees in the Iraqi capitol right now, and there’s not more than an hour or two of power available a day for, say, a refrigerator or an air conditioner. Knowing that’s the sort of thing that doesn’t incline an Iraqi very well to either the U.S. presence or the Iraqi government, how does the State Department react? According to the Los Angeles Times, the first thing to do is to stop updating Congress about how bad the problem is:
(T)he department now reports on the electricity generated nationwide, a measurement that does not indicate how much power Iraqis in Baghdad or elsewhere actually receive.
The change, a State Department spokesman said, reflects a technical decision by reconstruction officials in Baghdad who are scaling back efforts to estimate electricity consumption as they wind down U.S. involvement in rebuilding Iraq’s power grid.
Department officials said the new approach was more accurate than the previous estimates, which they said had been very rough and had failed to reflect wide variations across Baghdad and the country.
“Nothing is being hidden. There is no ulterior motive,” said David Foley, the department’s Middle East spokesman. “We are continuing to provide detailed information and have been completely transparent.”
The State Department’s new method shows that the national electricity supply is 4% lower than a year ago, according to the July 11 report.
Add “Baghdad electricity” to the Great List of disappeared information over the last six and a half years. Last one out, please turn on the lights.
