For some inexplicable reason, Republicans have been preoccupied for quite some time with Baghdad’s electrical supply, pointing to it as one of the good-news stories that Americans allegedly don’t hear about. The White House urged the media to cover it more a year ago; Tony Snow bragged about Iraq’s electricity-generating facilities; and then-House Speaker Dennis Hastert’s office boasted of Baghdad’s shining lights as an example of progress in the war.
At one point, the president even felt a little sorry for himself, whining to reporters at a press conference, “[I]ncreasing electricity in Baghdad is not the kind of thing that tends to get on the news.”
The reason, of course, is that electricity in Baghdad hasn’t been increasing at all. Indeed, it’s been one of the more chronic infrastructure problems plaguing the Iraqi city for the last couple of years. Indeed, over the last year or so, the number of hours Baghdad residents could expect electricity has actually dropped.
Don’t worry, the Bush administration has a plan to deal with all of this. Take steps to improve the power supply? Don’t be silly; the administration has decided to stop reporting on Baghdad’s electrical problems.
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.
It’s the quintessential Bush move — when struggling with discouraging news, it’s easier to hide it than fix it.
Administration officials deny any ulterior motive.
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.
There’s ample reason for skepticism. Using the new method, the State Department reports on electricity generated nationwide, which, wouldn’t you know it, does not offer details on how much power Iraqis in Baghdad or elsewhere actually receive.
“It’s unfortunate,” said Jason H. Campbell, a senior research assistant at the Brookings Institution who has been tracking quality-of-life measurements in Iraq since 2003. “What makes this metric even worth tracking is you want to see what’s happening to the average Iraqi.”
Campbell said the new reporting method made it impossible to know what the power situation was in Baghdad and elsewhere in Iraq.
It might be comical if the Bush gang hadn’t pulled this exact same stunt over and over again since taking office.