BAGHDAD -- Ikbal Ali, a bureaucrat in a beaded head scarf, accompanied by a phalanx of police officers, quickly found what she was looking for out in the summer swelter: electricity thieves.
Six black cables stretched from a power pole to a row of auto-repair shops, siphoning what few hours of power Iraq's straining system provides.
"Take them all down," Ali ordered, sending a worker up in a crane's bucket to disentangle the connections. A shop owner, Haitham Farhan, responded mockingly, using the words now uttered across Iraq as a curse: "Maku kahraba" - "There is no electricity."
From the beginning of the war more than seven years ago, the state of electricity has been one of the most closely watched benchmarks of Iraq's progress and of the American effort to transform a dictatorship into a democracy.
And yet, as the American combat mission officially ends this month, Iraq's government still struggles to provide one of the most basic services.
Ali's campaign against electricity theft - a belated bandage on a broken body - makes starkly clear the mixed legacy that the United States leaves behind as Iraq begins to truly govern itself, for better and worse.
Iraq now has elections, a functioning, if imperfect,army and an oil industry on the cusp of a potential boom. Yet Baghdad, the capital, had five hours of electricity a day inJuly.
The chronic power shortages are the result of myriad factors, including war, drought and corruption. But, ultimately, they reflect a dysfunctional government that remains deadlocked and unresponsive to popular will. That has generated disillusionment and dissent, including protests this summer that, while violent in two cases, were a different measure of Iraq's new freedoms.
"Democracy didn't bring us anything," Farhan said in his newly darkened shop. Then he corrected himself. "Democracy brought us a can of Coke and a beer."
The overall legacy of the U.S. invasion today, like that of the war itself, remains a matter of dispute, colored by ideology, politics and faith in democracy's ultimate ability to take root in the heart of the Arab world.
Even Iraqis suspicious of American motives hoped that the overthrow of Saddam Hussein would bring modern, competent governance. Still, though, the streets are littered with trash, drinking water is polluted, hospitals are bleak and often unsafe, and buildings bombed by the Americans in 2003 or by insurgents since remain ruined shells.
What is clear is that Iraqis' expectations of a reliable supply of electricity and other services, like their expectations of democracy itself, have exceeded what either Americans or the country's quarrelling politicians have so far been able to meet.
"Iraqi politicians are killing our optimism," Hassan Shihab said, complaining about blackouts after Friday prayer at a mosque in Baqubah, northwest of Baghdad. Dictatorship, he added, "was more merciful."
A longtime problem
Iraq's electricity problem is, of course, older than its still-uncertain embrace of a new form of governance. Before Saddam's invasion of Kuwait 20 years ago this month, Iraq had the capacity to produce 9,295 megawatts of power. By 2003, after American bombings and years of international sanctions, it was half that.
The shortages since have hobbled economic development and disrupted almostevery aspect of daily life. They have transformed cities. Rumbling generators outside homes and other buildings - previously nonexistent - and thickets of wires as thick as a jungle canopy have become as much a part of Iraq's cityscapes as blast walls and checkpoints.
Most of the generators are privately operated, and the cost - roughly $7 per ampere - has for ordinary Iraqis become too exorbitant to power anything more than a light and a TV.
"I've never seen good electricity from the day I was born," said Abbas Riyadh, 22, a barber in Sadr City, the impoverished Shiite neighborhood in Baghdad. As he spoke, as if on cue, the lights went out.
The United States has spent $5 billion on electrical projects alone, nearly 10 percent of the $53 billion it has devoted to rebuilding Iraq, second only to what it has spent on rebuilding Iraq's security forces. It has had some effect, but there have also been inefficiency and corruption, as there have been in projects to rebuild schools, water and sewerage systems, roads and ports.
The special inspector general for Iraqi reconstruction, Stuart W. Bowen Jr., said that one-quarter of 54 reconstruction projects his office had investigated - including those providing electricity and other basic services - had not been completed or carried on by the Iraqis they were built for.
The United States is now winding such projects down, leaving some unfinished and others, already in disrepair, in the hands of national and provincial governments that so far seem unwilling or unable to maintain and operate them adequately.
"We brought the framework of electoral democracy," Bowen said, "but its future efficacy is very much in doubt."
New, unmet demands
Iraq does generate more electricity than in 2003, but nowhere near enough to match rising demand, driven higher by the proliferation of consumer goods, especially air conditioners. Democracy, the easing of the country's isolation and improving security have, paradoxically, created new conditions and new demands that the government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki has been unable to address.
Iraq's electrical grid remains a patchwork of old power plants and new, supplemented with makeshift and inadequate solutions. Iraq now imports 700 megawatts from Iran. When temperatures soared this summer, it paid for two electricity-generating ships from Turkey to dock near Basrah, one of the most badly affected cities, at a cost of hundreds of thousands of dollars.
The country's transmission and distribution networks are aging and mismanaged by a bureaucracy as sclerotic as it was in Saddam's era.
The entire system is hampered by poor planning; by interagency rivalries that, for example, delay fuel to power plants; by a lack of conservation; and by continuing terrorist attacks on electrical towers, including four in the last half of July in Baghdad, Anbar and Diyala provinces.
A 'second insurgency'
Corruption - which the Special Inspector General's Office called Iraq's "second insurgency" in a report released Friday - is pervasive. Farhan, the shop owner, said his landlord bribed Ministry of Electricity workers to install the pirated cables three years ago. "He couldn't just connect the cables himself," Farhan said.
Al-Maliki and his ministers have pleaded for patience, which is clearly running out, especially as the newly elected Parliament remains deadlocked over choosing a new prime minister and government nearly five months after the election.
The new acting electricity minister, Hussain al-Shahristani, said at an investment conference in July that Iraq would add 5,000 megawatts by 2012 but acknowledged that that would not keep up with demand.
"The problem will persist, because there is no magic wand or miracle that can solve it," he said.
