Edmund L Andrews filed the chilling story ”Why Wheels of Recovery Are Spinning in Iraq“ for the NYT: “Electricity, essential to restoring normalcy to business and personal life, remains crippled because looters are stealing copper cable as quickly as it is being installed. Oil production, Iraq’s main source of income, is still far below its prewar level because of pilfering and perhaps even sabotage at oil fields and refineries. Big Iraqi factories are still idle, partly because they are antiquated, but also because they were gutted by theft and then immobilized by the lack of electricity. And foreign investors, whether large multinational corporations or the large population of wealthy Iraqi expatriates, say Iraq is still too unstable for them to make major financial commitments. ... Here in Basra, the big southern port city, residents say power failures are longer and more frequent now than they were when the war ended. The reason is that looters have stepped up their theft of high-tension cables, which they melt into copper bars and sell across the border in Iran. Just last week, the British military police here arrested eight men who were driving a large truck loaded with several tons of stolen cable. Iraqi police officers say that that was merely one of countless thefts, and that copper-melting shops continue to operate brazenly.”
A Picture of Economic Life in Iraq
