The people of Baghdad are suddenly free. They're free from washing, free from cooking, why they're even free from drinking. The Bush/Petraeus surge has worked so brilliantly that the Iraqis don't even have to flush their toilets - if they have toilets. There's no water in Baghdad. Hasn't been anything in the pipes for a while now.
The city's pathetic electricity grid can't produce enough power to operate the city's water purification and pumping stations.
That's not to say the locals couldn't use a bit of water right now. It's summer over there and it gets wicked hot. From TorStar:
Baghdad routinely suffers from periodic water outages, but this one is described by residents as one of the most extended and widespread in recent memory. The problem highlights the larger difficulties in a capital beset by violence, crumbling infrastructure, rampant crime and too little electricity to keep cool in the sweltering weather more than four years after the U.S.-led invasion.
Jamil Hussein, 52, a retired army officer who lives in northeast Baghdad, said his house has been without water for two weeks, except for two hours at night. He says the water that does flow smells bad and is unclean.
Two of his children have severe diarrhea that the doctor attributed to drinking what tap water was available, even after it was boiled.
"We'll have to continue drinking it, because we don't have money to buy bottled water," he said.
Adel al-Ardawi, a spokesman for the Baghdad city government, said that even with sufficient electricity "it would take 24 hours for the water mains to refill so we can begin pumping to residents. And even then the water won't be clean for a time. We just don't have the electricity or fuel for our generators to keep the system flowing."
Noah Miller, spokesman for the U.S. reconstruction program in Baghdad, said that water treatment plants were working "as far as we know."
I believe "as far as we know" is the lexicon currently used by the occupation for "don't know, don't care."
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