Reply #16: Well, yeah, kinda.

[GreenZoneLT]

We're on generator power AND city power, but we don't rely on the city power, because it frequently cuts out. Most Baghdadis are in a similar but worse boat; they get one or more hours a day of city power, and the rest of the time they use the "generator man" in their neighborhood with the gas-powered generator, who sells them power as they need it. It's totally screwed-up looking, how the electrical cables are draped along the street in these huge bundles of different colors.

In defense of the guys who really are trying to improve the power, there is a lot more power being generated now, but much of it's going to parts of Iraq that NEVER had power when Saddam ruled, rather than Baghdad. And there's been about a 70 percent increase in power demand, because people have bought fridges and satellite dishes, which were unavailable or illegal before the war.

Not to say things haven't been hideously mismanaged, but it's not that nobody's doing ANYTHING to try to fix the power situation. There are a lot of people working very hard on that, with insufficient resources and a basically impossible job considering the political/military environment.

2013 is when they estimate the entire country would have 24-hour electricity, which certainly has never existed in Iraq before. Even Baghdad had regularly scheduled rolling blackouts when Saddam was in charge.