Iraq's power deficit
It needs oil and machinery now
Leader
Tuesday August 12, 2003
The Guardian
There is nothing unpredictable about the summer heat of up to 125F which has inflamed Iraqi anger over shortages of water and fuel and led yesterday to a third day of stone-throwing outside British military headquarters in Basra. Unlike the European heatwave, such temperatures were to be expected: popular resentment at the failure of the occupying forces to restore these essential supplies was also unsurprising. The British forces on the ground may be doing what they can to help by diverting their own fuel resources, policing the petrol queues and trying to protect the power lines. Yet postwar planners in Washington and London have failed massively to anticipate the situation, more concerned to project their own power than to satisfy the power needs of millions of Iraqi people.
Coalition spokespeople routinely try to shift the blame for these shortages on to the Saddam Hussein administration which, it is suggested, deliberately left the national power grid - essential for keeping the water supply flowing - in a deplorable state. The occupying forces merely inherited a bad situation, the argument goes, now compounded by smuggling and sabotage on the part of "Saddam loyalists". It is true that the system was only limping along before the war began, but that is not the end of the argument. Around 85% of Iraq's national power grid was destroyed deliberately by US bombing in the 1990-91 Iraq war: although Baghdad managed to restore more than two-thirds of it, many repairs were only achieved by temporary patching. Vital new equipment, including generators and water pipes, was routinely blocked over the next decade under the economic sanctions regime. To what extent the system was further degraded in the recent war is still unclear: Washington's claim that "the coalition did not target the power grid", if true, stands in remarkable contrast to the earlier devastation. In any case it was not hard to anticipate that an already overloaded system would collapse under the strain of a new war.
The answer is not simply to crank up oil production for export - which has been a top priority so far. As a careful report in the New York Times yesterday notes, Iraq's obsolete refineries produce too much heavy fuel oil and too little of the gasoline, diesel fuel and kerosene needed for internal consumption. According to a UN estimate, less than half of the domestic demand can now be satisfied. While oil is again being exported, the refined products have to be shipped in, and kerosene which should be stockpiled for the winter has to be dispensed now. Yesterday's news from Basra that one of the country's main refineries producing gasoline has closed because of power failures is a further blow.
What is needed now is a crash programme on two fronts. First, stockpiles must be built up by importing the deficit fuels - and without waiting until Iraq can pay for them through its own exports of heavy fuel oil. Second, funds must be freed now - and bureaucratic logjams freed as well - to repair and install the vital equipment needed, particularly for power transmission and for water purification and pumping. Whatever the cost of such a programme, it will only be a fraction of the coalition's military outlay. The £200m of aid committed by the Department for International Development pales beside the £1bn spent on the British campaign before the war had even begun. Iraq's long-term needs, we are told, still await assessment in the autumn. This is an immediate one which will not wait.
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