JOURNAL: Electricity and Militias in Iraq

Almost two years ago, I wrote about the need to restore essential services (electricity and street level security) in Iraq as the key to providing the new Iraqi government with legitimacy -- see State Failure 101. The problem being that the majority of the US effort was dedicated to exactly the wrong set of priorities. As long as these essentials were ignored, I argued, the Iraqi state would continue to hollow out. This is exactly what occurred -- the open source insurgency has become very adept at disrupting electricity and militias have formed in almost every neighborhood to provide street level security.

Unsurprisingly, this week, both the US and Iraqi governments belatedly came around to this position -- both the US State Department and the new Iraqi government have both claimed electricity and militiasare now their top priority (from the NYTimes).

Administration officials said that in his meeting with Ms. Rice, Mr. Maliki spoke of "re-establishing trust" among Iraqis by acting quickly to restore electrical power and root out the influence of militias in Iraq's police forces, which number about 135,000 nationwide.

Unfortunately, the ability to make headway in these areas is going to be much, much tougher than two years ago. Pandora's box has been left open too long.

Comments

[Veteran]

Their priorities are well-understood.

The electrical grid is the MOST critical and MOST-EXPOSED systempunkt in any country. 'Juice' can't be stored like water or food can. There must be a protected, immovable conduction path from the source to the end consumer. Costs too much to bury it and it can't be hidden, either.

Zimbabwean rebels repeatedly nailed the power pylons from Hwange to Salisbury during the Zimbabwe civil war. RENAMO rebels blew up the pylons from Cabora Bassa dam to keep Maputo in the dark during the Mozambican civil war too. The big fight in the DRC war, Eastern front was over who controlled the lifeblood Inge Dam.

The Harvard-educated anti-technologist 'Unabomber' wrote that "..the (technocratic) system is UTTERLY DEPENDENT on its electric-power grid." Without juice, nothing works.

As for an American example, when Katrina hit, V.P. Cheney risked lives in hospitals to divert power crews away from hospitals to instead fix the powerlines that drove the pipeline pumps to huge prevent gas price spikes in the downstream markets.

Who runs Iraq's Bartertown?

[Cardenio]

I think the TZ episode was called " The Monsters on Mulberry Street " ? But are the ' insurgents ' the perpetrators or are we really puppeteering the whole show ?

[Dimitar Vesselinov]

Niall Kennedy:
"One of my favorite scenes in Lawrence of Arabia is 'Chaos in Damascus.' The Arabs have just captured Damascus from the Turks and various civil tasks are divided between multiple tribes. Damascus in the hands of Turks was a pie-in-the-sky dream they never thought was possible, yet they are now all in the great hall trying to organize.

There is infighting among the tribes, civil tasks break down, and tribal leaders point fingers blaming other tribes or things they do not understand. The telephones do not work because they have no electricity. There is no electricity because no one will fix the generators. Finally, fire breaks out in the city but the tribes will not carry a bucket of water to put out the flames.

The Chaos in Damascus scene seems a lot like life in a big corporation to me. Tribal pride instead of a gleaming city. Here's the movie clip on YouTube."
http://www.niallkennedy.com/blog/archives/2006/04/big-companies-a.html
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YhBIPZCVj84