Rory McCarthy (London Guardian): Iraq goes from bad to worse

[Jack Rabbit]

From the Guardian of London
Dated Wednesday August 27

Even the optimists are losing heart as Iraq goes from bad to worse
The Guardian's corresponsdent returns to Baghdad after two months to find electricity and water still in short supply, aid workers leaving, and insecurity growing
By Rory McCarthy

It was late June and the searing heat of summer was taking hold when finally, after weeks of searching, I found what I had been looking for. Over several days I met a group of extraordinary young Iraqis who - without anger, fear or hatred - were beginning to shape the outlines of a bright future for their country.
The first was a Shia Muslim whom Ba'athist thugs tried to execute in a mass grave in March 1991. Miraculously he had escaped and crawled to freedom. He was now working with a handful of human rights lawyers in the town of Hilla, where they were drawing up the evidence to begin trials of those responsible for the killings. They were calm where others would have been vengeful, committed where others would have balked at the scale of the task ahead.
For weeks I had chronicled endless lootings, killings, betrayals, broken promises and tragic misunderstandings, the grotesque accoutrements of a modern military occupation. Nothing else I had seen in Iraq since America's war spoke to me with such hope as these men and their promise of a reasoned, moral reckoning that would drag their country away from the legacy of three decades of dictatorship towards a brighter future. I left believing that against all the odds there was still a chance Iraq would succeed.
Nearly two months later, I have returned to Iraq and so much has changed. A wave of fury and despair among Iraqis has drowned out the few voices that filled me with hope. Those of my Iraqi friends who clung resolutely to their optimistic dreams are finally losing heart. They shrug their shoulders and begin to list the unrelenting failures of the new Iraq.
It is not that the power supply has still not improved. It has worsened. Four months after television screens across the world showed the victorious toppling of Saddam Hussein's statue in Firdous Square, power cuts are more frequent, not less. In many Baghdad homes the water that flows from the taps is brackish and undrinkable. Water treatment plants, short of electricity and poisoned by their own rusting pipes, are failing.
How could a country, the Iraqis ask, that spent $9bn (£5.73bn) a month fighting the war against Saddam not restore the power supply to a city within four months?

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