How Bright Are the Lights In Baghdad?

President Bush said the economy in Iraq is making steady progress, but lets look at some fundamentals.

From Fred Kaplan on Slate.com

"Iraq's electrical power grid appears as dim as ever, or dimmer. Average daily supply—about 80,000 megawatts—falls 55,000 megawatts short of daily demand. It's 30,000 megawatts below the target that planners tried to hit last summer. And it's 15,000 megawatts below the average pre-war level. (A new power plant turbine in Kirkuk, which is about to fire up, will add just 260 megawatts to this total, according to the report. Two new substations, which Bush heralded in his speech, will service a mere 2,500—out of roughly 1 million—homes in Baghdad.)

Baghdad, a capital city of roughly 6 million people, has only 6.1 hours of electrical power a day; nationwide, the average is 11.9 hours a day. The situation is, if anything, worsening; in the previous week's report, the respective figures were 8.7 and 12.6 hours.

Crude oil output—which Paul Wolfowitz once told us would pay for the war within months of Saddam's toppling—is stagnant, at 2 million barrels a day, well below the official goal of 2.5 million."