Is this Progress in Iraq?

As the Bush administration and other Republicans insist progress is being made in Iraq, the amount of electricity in Baghdad has dramatically dropped.

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.

But that piece of data has not been sent to lawmakers for months because the State Department, which prepares a weekly "status report" for Congress on conditions in Iraq, stopped estimating in May how many hours of electricity Baghdad residents typically receive each day.

Instead, the department now reports on the electricity generated nationwide, a measurement that does not indicate how much power Iraqis in Baghdad or elsewhere actually receive. [emphasis added]

This reminds of something 4th District candidate Selden Spencer wrote last summer while traveling Afghanistan.

If We Could Just Do a Better Job of Providing the Basics, Our Presence Here and in Iraq Might Be More Tolerated, and Perhaps Even Welcomed.