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Sunday, June 27, 2004 |
 Chicago-Tribune. Global guerrillas in Iraq. Existing businesses sit idle while investment/expertise is impossible to get. What is interesting to me is that al Qaeda's operations in the country have proven able to isolate and distract (see Boyd on al Qaeda's Grand Strategy for more) US/Iraqi decision makers from key factors necessary for success. What we are seeing is a systemic failure of decision loops induced by outside forces (garbage in = garbage out).
Despite the fact that the CPA doesn't publish power stats anymore (to prevent global guerrillas from getting feedback on attacks) here is a rapid feedback loop: The unmistakable symbols of Iraq's economic woes are four towering smokestacks along the Tigris River, rising out of the hulking al Doura power plant. Not a single curl of smoke has wafted from them in several days. The plant can produce 680 megawatts of power. It is producing zero.
Impact is widespread: In a country where summer temperatures rise to 120 degrees, electricity is more than a luxury. Without air conditioners, a summer day in Baghdad becomes a reminder of what is absent. And without power to rev up Iraq's factories and plants, thousands of jobless people become restless, angry and violent. Iraqis deal with blackouts of up to 16 hours a day. According to Defense Department documents obtained by the Center for Strategic and International Studies, seven of Iraq's 18 provinces receive an average of less than eight hours of power daily. Eight provinces, including Baghdad, average 9 to 15 hours of electricity each day. Unemployment is estimated at about 28 percent, with an additional 21.6 percent of Iraqis underemployed.
Impact on investment (the pipeline to fixing the economy and reducing violence): The violence has slowed progress in recruiting investment and increasing business, Iraqi business leaders and U.S. officials say. The CPA has delivered (only) $5 million in small-business loans to stimulate growth. Some Iraqi entrepreneurs, however, say violence has stymied their hopes of finding foreign partners. Industrial developer Zuhair Hamid says he has a plan and funding to build what would be Iraq's first modern chicken feed factory. But Hamid says his project has been held up because the Dutch company that is contracted to build the factory told him it is too dangerous to send foreign workers. "It was important to me to be among the first back in Iraq and investing," Hamid said. "Until the situation improves, there is little we can do."
4:30:10 PM 
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Golden BB kills one in attack on C-130 in Iraq.
4:05:07 PM
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NYT: China. The average Internet user, meanwhile, neither sees nor, in many cases, suspects the activities of a force widely estimated to number as many as 30,000 Internet police officers.
2:49:52 PM
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BH. Iran to resume nuclear enrichment program. Unintended fall-out from the difference on the US approach to problems with Iraq and North Korea.
12:58:22 PM
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Green Car: A chart of Oman's oil production demonstrates a classic "peak production" curve.
12:48:07 PM
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Journal entry. Billions are being spent on critical infrastructure protection with little knowledge of how to do it.
12:37:58 PM
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MSNBC. Sub-space battlelab (this AF site needs a redesign) test goes awry.
12:09:14 PM
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DefenseTech weblog: Homeland security department to use Israeli Hermes UAV drones to watch the US-Mexico border.
12:04:35 PM
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eTawianNews. The high price of oil ($8 of which is a "global guerrilla premium") is helping to destroy China's air quality. The reason is that China's demand for oil is skyrocketing and it has opted for high sulfur content oil to save money. This sulfur rich oil destroys catalytic converters (which reduces auto fuel efficiency) and creates intense smog.
China's largest refining company, said it was aggressively importing high-sulfur oil because it is US$1 a barrel cheaper than sweet crude.
11:36:09 AM
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Australia to bring together business leaders to protect critical infrastructure. I am not sure this will work without a framework for analyzing the problem. I am more than happy to help, but I don't have any contacts with this effort. This is one of those situations where some low cost upfront thinking can prevent hundreds of millions of dollars expended on efforts that won't work.
10:42:04 AM
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Remember the CACI interrogator's weblog that I pointed to in Google's cache (authored by Joe Ryan, a CACI interrogator who worked at Abu Ghraib)? It is now gone from the cache. The Boston Globe was able to find some e-mailed entries from the weblog which produced some interesting items:
Ryan had written in an entry on March 30 that the ''big news at work" was a message from ("Condi") Rice ''thanking us for the intelligence that has come out of our shop and noting that our work is being briefed to President Bush on a regular basis." Rice was put in charge of coordinating Iraq policy at the prisons in October. A spokesman for Rice said he could find no record of any such communication.
Ryan also states that the International Committee for the Red Cross, or ICRC -- prison monitors which he described as an ''anti-American fascist organization" -- were asked to leave Abu Ghraib.
In the same March 30 diary entry, Ryan said that Major General Barbara Fast, head of the coalition's intelligence operations in Iraq, barred the CIA from freely entering the prison because of an unspecified incident there that earned Fast's ''ire." ''Clowns International, the CIA, has proven once again that they are incompetent boobs," he wrote on March 30, adding that he could not go into detail about the incident that had upset Fast. ''They cannot set foot on Abu Ghraib without her expressed permission (which will not happen anytime soon) after their latest stunt."
Of course, the Globe's article will soon be removed to archive (it never was fully in Google). This entry will be one of the few public records left.
10:39:13 AM
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© Copyright 2004 John Robb.
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