Free To Be a Friend Is Fatal by Kirk W. Johnson Page A

compound, a friend likened the night to a group of Brits goofing around in Independence Hall in 1787, and I laughed guiltily. When CNN and Al-Jazeera gushed out reports on the opening session the following morning, the legs of the Steinway peeked from below the backdrop like a partly exposed secret.
    Our world was gray and etiolating, domed with blast roofs and walled with concrete, made frigid by industrial air-conditioning, and in the alleys of our pale blue cubicles we pecked out reports for headquarters and called contractors who were sealed away in another compound a block over. On our computer desktops we kept our copy of the ubiquitous BaghdadDonut.xls file, in which a doughnut-shaped progress bar reflected how many months, weeks, days, hours, minutes, and seconds you’d been in Iraq and how many months, weeks, days, hours, minutes, and seconds before you could board the Rhino Runner, a steel-reinforced armored bus, back to the airport.
Electricity and Unrest
    Yaghdan and I became friends, a friendship limited by his departure from the compound each day at five. We weren’t able to socialize after work; I didn’t know where he lived, and only knew Haifa’s name. But in the kiln of the summer heat, he often showed up an hour early to rest his eyes in USAID’s air-conditioned building. He had been working with the Americans for nearly a year, and his job brought him into the nerve center of the reconstruction efforts. In the chilled air of the cafeteria, he told me his work in the agency’s education office was fulfilling but that it felt peripheral to Iraq’s primary need, which was electricity.
    Back in August 2003, when Yaghdan was recuperating from the gunshot wound, the Coalition Provisional Authority’s viceroy, Paul Bremer, broadcast a message to the people of Iraq: “About one year from now, for the first time in history, every Iraqi in every city, town, and village will have as much electricity as he or she can use; and he will have it twenty-four hours a day, every single day.” This was meant as a rebuke of the electricity policy of Saddam Hussein, in which power produced in the Kurdish north and the Shi’a south was routed to benefit the Sunni center of Baghdad; now everyone would be expected to share. But as soon as USAID engineers repaired the 400-kilovolt transmission line connecting the grid in the southern provinces to the Sunni heartland, Shi’a plant managers in the south dispatched employees to blow it up. So long as the line was inoperable, Basrah and other Shi’a cities couldn’t be asked to share and would enjoy the benefits of full power.
    And so when the brutal summer of 2005 baked in, with temperatures consistently approaching 120 degrees, only a few hours of electricity flickered through Baghdad’s grid each day. No water flowed from the faucets, forcing many to dig crude wells in their backyards to drink and bathe in the fetid groundwater. Water-borne illness spread, along with infant mortality due to conditions such as diarrhea.
    Our well-fueled arsenal of Green Zone generators kept our power steady and water pure, insulating us from the only metric that counted: the number of hours of electricity each day, the truest barometer of violence and insurgency. Without power, businesses couldn’t stay open past sundown, newborn babies couldn’t be incubated at hospitals,schoolchildren couldn’t find relief from the heat during class, and, most important, other essential services, such as water treatment plants, couldn’t operate. Throughout the country, local entrepreneurs purchased medium-sized generators and sold access to a meager current of electricity: enough for a small fan but not a refrigerator. Before long, messily bundled arteries of makeshift power lines were everywhere. I backbenched a meeting at the palace in which military officers pleaded for speedier progress on electrical projects: they were tired of