No Ice Cubes, No Fresh Milk

You would have to be either a blind optimist or a card carrying member of the crew without a clue not to have seen this coming. Every day millions of dollars in oil are missing, totally unaccounted for. Unless you count graft, corruption, smuggling and outright theft among the probable culprits. There is a small possibility that Iraqis either miscounted or overestimated, but that wouldn't fit in with the history of the country as much as the previous options. Either way it isn't good and just like everything else we hear from Iraq, it's just the tip of the iceberg.

The report also contains the most comprehensive assessment yet of the billions of dollars the United States and Iraq spent on rebuilding the oil and electricity infrastructure, which is falling further and further behind its performance goals.

Adding together both civilian and military financing, the report concludes that the United States has spent $5.1 billion of the $7.4 billion in American taxpayer money set aside to rebuild the Iraqi electricity and oil sectors. The United States has also spent $3.8 billion of Iraqi money on those sectors, the report says.

Despite those enormous expenditures, the performance is far short of official goals, and in some cases seems to be declining further. The average output of Iraq’s national electricity grid in 2006, for example, was 4,300 megawatts, about equal to its value before the 2003 invasion. By February of this year, the figure had fallen still further, to 3,800 megawatts, the report says.

All of those figures are far short of the longstanding American goal for Iraq: 6,000 megawatts. Even more dispiriting for Iraqis, by February the grid provided power for an average of only 5.1 hours a day in Baghdad and 8.6 hours nationwide. Both of those figures are also down from last year.

Isn't it nice how we've improved the quality of the Iraqi's lives? They must be so appreciative of all the time, effort, manpower, and most of all, money that the American taxpayer has been unwillingly contributing. And just like here in America, all that wealth isn't spread evenly among the people. Kind of like a pyramid scheme. A really bad one.