Riverbend, Water, and Post-Dictatorship Trauma Syndrome

Riverbend, the female Iraqi blogger who lives in Baghdad, posted for the first time in five days, and she started out talking about a trickle of water that was flowing, after eight days of dryness, out of her family's bathroom faucet. They're filling buckets for future use in case the water gets cut off. She also reports that they're only getting 4 hours of electricity out of every 24 -- which might account for her relative absence in the blogosphere.

She goes on to wax negative on the election coming up, conditions in Baghdad (generally bad), and ends with a bash at Bush. The usual, in other words.

The funny thing is, Riverbend writes about how bad it is in Baghdad, but I, at least, haven't seen quite that much complaining about conditions in other places. Why, I asked myself, was Baghdad suffering so much from electricity and water shortages? You'd think the capital city, of all places, would be seeing power and water constantly, wouldn't you? Well, there might be a good reason for this not to be the case.

Chrenkoff wrote in his blog back in September about why Baghdad is having it so rough. Check it out here. Baghdad is catching it in the shorts because Saddam is no longer there to force the power providers in other cities to supply Baghdad, which had only limited organic power and water generating capability.