If you’re the Bush Administration & things aren’t going as well as you’d like them to in Iraq, do you change strategies? Admit the “surge” might not be working? Confess that the outcome has been disappointing? No, you just stop reporting the bad news, of course!
“As the Bush administration struggles to convince lawmakers that its Iraq war strategy is working, it has stopped reporting to Congress a key quality-of-life indicator in Baghdad: how long the power stays on.
Ryan Crocker, the U.S. ambassador to Iraq, told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee last week that Baghdad residents could count on only “an hour or two a day” of electricity. That’s down from an average of five to six hours a day earlier this year.”
That’s right after how many years, how many billions in reconstruction, now many no-bid contracts, Baghdad residents get just one or two hours of electricity a day! With summer temperatures well over 110 degrees it’s tough to win over the “hearts & minds” if those “hearts & minds” can’t use their air conditioners.
