Global Policy Forum

By Alan Elsner

The United States hopes to boost the availability of electricity throughout Iraq to at least 18 hours a day by the end of next year from 11 to 15 hours now, the top U.S. aid official said on Friday. U.S. Agency for International Development administrator Andrew Natsios said power generation would rise from a daily average of 5,000 megawatts now to 5,500 to 6,000 megawatts by the middle of next year. The level before the 2003 U.S. invasion was around 4,400 megawatts. "Despite the insurgency in some areas of the country, our program is moving forward," Natsios said at a State Department news briefing. "Right now, we have 11 to 15 hours of electricity around the country. We expect to get to 18 to 20 hours by the end of 2005."

He said the insurgency was delaying reconstruction in the so-called Sunni Triangle in central Iraq, but in Shi'ite and Kurdish areas, which constituted 80 percent of the country, the security situation was not seriously disrupting work. Guerrillas trying to drive out U.S.-led troops and overthrow the U.S.-backed government of Prime Minister Iyad Allawi have mounted repeated attacks on Iraqi security forces, targeting police stations and checkpoints with suicide bombs and kidnapping and killing scores of police and National Guard before national elections scheduled for Jan. 30.

In the latest attacks on Friday, a suicide car bomber smashed into a Shi'ite mosque in Baghdad after dawn prayers Friday, killing 14 people. In a second dawn attack in the capital, guerrillas fired mortars at a police station near the notorious airport road in the southwest of Baghdad and then stormed the building, hunting down and shooting the occupants. At least eleven policemen were killed and six wounded.

Despite this violence, Natsios gave a generally upbeat briefing on the situation. He said more than 7,000 reconstruction projects were under way or had been completed. Roads, rail, bridges, airports, water treatment plants, sewage and thousands of schools had been upgraded or rebuilt and large-scale public health projects were under way. "Our work in Iraq is the largest reconstruction project since the Marshall Plan," he said, referring to the massive effort to rebuild European nations after the Second World War.

He said the United States had spent $3.6 billion in the past year of $18.4 billion approved by Congress for reconstruction. Projects accounting for an additional $9.4 billion were planned or had already been approved. U.S. auditors reported to Congress last month they had opened more than 100 cases involving alleged abuse of reconstruction funds. But Natsios insisted, "We are not seeing much corruption at all in our contracts."