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

sweeping up bodies each morning of Iraqis who had electrocuted themselves trying to tap into the informal grid of generators.
    As the war trundled along, many Iraqis began to see the American failure to restore power as something deliberate, part of a plan. How else could one explain why the superpower’s helicopters never ferried in generators? The Iraqis’ disbelief turned to anger and a rapidly winnowing trust in the motives of the occupying American troops.
    Soon after I arrived, I was invited to an ornate conference room in the palace for a weekly meeting with a council of public affairs “professionals” representing the State Department, the military, IRMO, PCO, USACE, and other acronyms I hadn’t yet deciphered. On the wall was a large indentation that once held a portrait of Saddam Hussein. In its place hung a satellite map of Fallujah.
    The chair of the meeting, a State Department official, started with an exclamation: “Goddamit, we need to show the world that we are making progress on the power and water!”
    The public affairs working group in the embassy wanted to deliver some good news about America’s progress in the power sector, and since USAID was in charge of nearly $3 billion dedicated to electrical generation under a contract with Bechtel, I needed to find a project to showcase. Back at the compound, I wandered into the Infrastructure Office in search of the tough but jovial Texan named Dick Dumford. He cleared some papers from a chair by his desk and swung it around for me. “Whaddya wanna know, kiddo?” he barked. Above his desk was a massive poster of a Siemens V94 turbine generator. I pointed to it and asked, “What’s that?”
    â€œThat’s MOAG!” he cried. “The Mother of All Generators!”
    The V94 was purchased for around $50 million in 2003. With aweight of seven hundred tons, it could not be flown in by helicopter: the generator was so fragile that it could be transported only on a special 120-tire truck at a maximum rate of five miles per hour. When USAID purchased it, the V94 was at the Syrian port of Tartous, and plans were made to construct a $178 million power plant in the northern Iraqi city of Kirkuk. A base camp was created, and a housing structure for MOAG and its transformers were installed. All that remained was the generator.
    The generator truck reached the Tishrin Dam on a bend in the Euphrates east of Aleppo. When the US government imposed sanctions on the Syrian government, Damascus responded by refusing to let the generator cross the dam. USAID made the decision to reroute the V94 through Jordan and then through Iraq’s volatile Anbar Province, adding months of delays.
    For most of 2004 and early 2005, the generator sat near the Jordan-Iraq border, costing USAID $20,000 each day to hire a security firm to protect it. In order to bring it to the base camp (which also cost USAID dearly to protect), the agency needed to transport the generator through the most violent geography of Iraq, but before that could happen, roads needed to be repaved and low-hanging power lines had to be cleared away. The steel girders sent out by the agency to reinforce a bridge were stolen before they could be affixed. A single Kalashnikov round could ruin the entire generator.
    When the convoy finally moved, it was heralded as the single largest troop movement in Iraq since the invasion. Three hundred marines and private security contractors accompanied it, supported by Cobra attack helicopters. Weeks after it crossed into Iraq, two years behind schedule, and tens of millions of dollars over budget, the Mother of All Generators arrived in Kirkuk.
    By one count, the amount of money spent on the security firm to protect it nearly equaled the cost of the generator itself. For the same amount, USAID could have purchased scores of smaller generators and had them inside Iraq within weeks, but these don’t provide as dramatic a