Would you rather have television or running water?

The United States Department of Defense thinks Iraqis would rather have television. In fact, according to a recent Washington Post article, the DOD is going to pay contractors in Iraq up to $300,000,000 to create entertainment media for Iraqis. Is this really necessary when on some days Iraqis only have two hours of electricity and often lack running water? Is this a ploy to inspire complacency in order to get Iraqis to back off the Governments? Is this how we imagine Iraqis should and would want to spend their two hours of electricity? There are two blogs dealing with Iraq that I read semi-regularly and probably one of the most dominant themes is lack of accessible resources and utilities. Here's a recent quote from Sunshine's blog:

Few days ago I saw an interview with the minister of electricity, the interviewer asked him about the lack of electricity and told him how people feel frustrated because of that. He replied “the lack of electricity started two weeks ago .”
I said “WHAT ???!!!! TWO WEEKS? “ Oh my god what a liar?! What about all nights I stayed up studying in the dark carrying a book in a hand and a torch in another? What about all hot summer nights that I couldn’t sleep in when we didn’t have electricity and the humidity was high ?? what about all the nights I froze in winter and couldn't feel my feet. What about the icy water in winter?…. …
We live in darkness, prepare food on torch lights, study, take showers, pray, clean, etc, life without electricity is unbearable, the last thing we need is someone say “their was electricity till the last two weeks”
I wish one day I’ll wake up and hear we got a new honest government..
Sunshine…
Note : my grandparents will come to Mosul to spend Eid with us, i didn't see them for about a year and I can't wait till I give them a huge hug.
And school will start on the fifth of October , I hope I'll be able to go to school easily, and have electricity to study, and the most important thing I pray that the situation will get better so that I can finally concentrate and think about studying only [...]

Another blog I read regularly is Baghdad Treasure's blog. This is where I first heard about the $300,000,000 thing. Barack Obama stated in the Presidential debates (as did McCain, I think, and also the New York Times in August) that Iraq will have a 79 billion dollar surplus by the end of the year from sales of their oil reserves, with a total 156 billion from oil since the beginning of 2005. Where's that money now and where is it all going while America is spending 10 billion a month on reconstruction efforts, and entertainment apparently? I'm not saying America shouldn't pay for the mess it made, but it seems like Iraqi money that should be being spent to improve the lives of Iraqis is somehow being misspent by those higher up who already have what they need. I feel like there is so much attention on pressuring America to fix their mess and rebuild that maybe the Iraqi government thinks their bad budgeting will be overlooked. The Iraqi Prime Minister, Ali Baban, has been quoted as saying:

I admit that there is some delay in spending the money on the projects in the provinces and in the ministries. We have problems in this issue because there are lots of obstacles we face, because of the situation that we’re going through. We’re trying to deal with that, we’re trying to improve things, but you know the situation in Iraq.

Yeah, the situation is that Iraqi's government is just as corrupt as America's, and it's no coincidence. America seems to have the Midas touch of corruption.

But this is more about that 300 million that should be going to reconstruction and is obviously and accountably being misspent, or at least that's what I really intended to point out in this blog post. This article on Iraq's use of solar for streetlamps to improve security, points out that "A rough standard worldwide is it costs approximately $1 million to create a power plant to generate one megawatt of power [... $6M-$7M for solar per megawatt]" So, if you take the $300,000,000 that might go to a single contractor to create entertainment media, you could potentially build ten 30 megawatt power plants, each powering 15,000 homes (according to this estimate I found in a Yahoo message thread). That's 150,000 people with constant electricity for the price of one U.S. entertainment contract, and then Iraqis might actually be able to afford televisions and have electricity to use them if they wanted to! If John McCain wants to build 50 nuclear power plants in the U.S.A., America can at least do a little better in Iraq, and the Iraqi government could too.

Links:
Baghdad Treasure's blog: It's A New World
Sunshine's blog: Days Of My life
Kim Stafford, who introduced me to the two preceding blogs
Iraq's Electricity: Starved Capital Turns To Solar
NYT: As Iraqi surplus rises, little goes into rebuilding