Bush Plan's $1B Won't Go Far in Iraq (AP)

[Eugene]

Bush Plan's $1B Won't Go Far in Iraq

By CHARLES J. HANLEY
The Associated Press
Sunday, January 14, 2007; 3:00 PM

-- The extra billion dollars of reconstruction aid in President Bush's Iraq plan
won't go far in a country where electricity output still barely meets half the
demand and oil production is falling short by almost a million barrels a day.

And a companion part of the plan, to expand U.S. aid teams scattered across
Iraq, may falter because of a shortage of volunteers. Some say it may have
to start ordering civilian U.S. government employees into the war zone,
as was done for Vietnam.

-snip-

"It is symbolic, at best, and is unlikely to have substantial impact in Iraq,"
Gordon Adams, a budget expert at Washington's Woodrow Wilson Center,
said of the Bush aid proposal.

-snip-

For electricity alone, Iraq needs $27 billion to fully rebuild the grid to meet
growing power needs, Baghdad's Electricity Ministry estimates. In a new Iraq
oversight report, the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) says Iraq's
electricity demand averaged 8,210 megawatts last year, but peak generation
reached only 4,317 megawatts. Baghdad residents got only six hours of power
a day on average last summer.

-snip-

Full article: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/01/14/AR2007011400452.html

[rodeodance]

1. its a baby carrot

[hughee99]

2. Won't go far IN IRAQ?

It won't even actually make it TO IRAQ.