Our Views: Outages plague Iraq for years
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After just a few days, power outages in the Baton Rouge area caused by Hurricane Gustav started to fray nerves.
Power outages disrupted basic routines, inspired much discomfort, created security concerns and brought special challenges to the elderly and those in poor health. The outages also have meant economic pain as many businesses lost their ability to function.
Imagine what this sort of power outage would be like if it lasted not three weeks, but five years. That’s the horror which continues to plague Iraq since the American-led invasion in 2003, correspondent Anne Garrels recently reported on National Public Radio.
Today, many Iraqis can expect only an hour or two of utility power each day, if that much. Extra electricity must come from home generators. As many Baton Rouge residents recently have been reminded, generators are expensive to operate, and they’re rarely a complete substitute for the power that comes from a utility company. But these are the expedients upon which Iraqis have been relying on a daily basis for years.
Even before 2003, Iraq’s power grid was inadequate. Baghdad was favored with a limited power supply at the expense of outlying areas, and American efforts to distribute the limited power supply more equitably have spread the pain around, making it more evident. Years of economic sanctions before the war also compromised maintenance of the power grid, and looting and corruption continue to plague power generation efforts in Iraq.
“I don’t know how the Iraqis have done it,” Marilyn O’Brien told The New York Times after experiencing Baton Rouge’s outage.
When we see how lack of electrical power changed civic life in the Baton Rouge area over the course of a few days, it’s easy to understand the enormous obstacles facing Iraqi civic life in a country where power outages are routine.
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