Iraq Needs 1.21 Gigawatts!

A lot of what goes on between many blogs left and right is little other than a snowball fight with bits and pieces of information that can only be described as Fark. In a nation where information transmission approaches instantaneous, and where any side of a debate has almost no limits on how fast and far they can propagate a smear or a lie or a slant, I think we seem to be forgetting something important about Iraq and how information has to move there. The difference is actually fairly observable in normal media reports.

The Christian Science monitor has an article up about a brand-new Iraqi power plant that's been built as part of the effort to restore Iraqi infrastructure. While I would advise reading the whole thing, this caught my attention:

"To get power, many Iraqis string wires from their homes to truck-size generators that sit on street corners. But US and Iraqi officials aim to get most Iraqis on the country's power grid."

As the article states, the average amount of electricity is something on the order of 8 hours a day in Baghdad, and more in other places. So we already know for certain that at least some Iraqis - and I would wager most rural Iraqis - don't operate on a 24-hour news cycle like the blogosphere does. Even those with TVs and radios are subject to a serious amount of down-time. TV and Radio would be the fastest methods in the absence of a computer, and even those will only function 8 hours a day without batteries.

Then there's this:

"Regional and sectarian politics also play a role in the distribution of power. US officials say it's important to send as much power as possible to Baghdad in the hope that it could stabilize the city, home to some of Iraq's worst violence.

But in Iraq's outlying areas, the common perception is that the networks that distribute power often bypass the small cities and towns in favor of Baghdad, creating resentment."

Lets assume for a minute that this isn't really what's happening, just for argument's sake. For the purpose of the argument, let's assume that they aren't redirecting power that would otherwise go to rural areas, but rather that there simply isn't enough power to send out to those areas during the uptime, and Baghdad's commercial activities are more important than some rural village. Harsh, but probably true.

If you're MNF-I or ISF, you have 8 hours to communicate a message to those rural areas explaining that. Insurgent groups and just generally PO'ed citizens have the remaining 16 to counteract your message, assuming that you're on top of the news cycle and you get all 8 hours of radio and TV time - which you won't.

The point here is that not every Iraqi has a computer and can get information instantly. And those who do have access to power for 8 hours a day, just like those who depend on TV and radio for news. Misperceptions and lies aren't corrected with the same speed that they are in the States, or with the same effect. Anything that is said locally is not instantly transmitted nationally. Lies can have up to 16 hours on any given day to settle in, before anyone has a chance to correct it. At which point, it can be locally discredited immediately. And another news cycle passes.

In FM 3-24, a significant LLO (Logical Line of Operation) in counterinsurgency is Information Operations. It is explained that in an era where a 24-hour news cycle exists at home, IO is much more important than it ever has been. Counterinsurgency forces have to be on message, all the time to get good, accurate information into that cycle so that the insurgent's violence isn't allowed to take over for days. Now extrapolate that out, just for yuks.

The top generals are concerned with losing message time measured in days, in a nation where news is transmitted 24 hours of every 24 hours. What does that mean when a given province in Iraq can receive news for only 8 hours of every 24? In all likelihood, it means that IO in the host nation are 3 times more important, and 3 times more difficult to stay on top of. At least.

And now consider that in our cycle, feedback is near-instantaneous and en masse in the form of blog counter-posts, comments sections, and email. In the Iraqi cycle, it's town meetings, phone calls, letters, with the addendum of 8 hours worth of email - 1/3rd of our capacity, at a much slower pace, and not nearly as voluminous.

So how do you fix all this?

"'We now need to start to improve the basic services,' General Odierno said while in Washington last month. 'If we can do that, I think we will see a tipping point' in Iraqi tolerance of the US occupation and support for the current Iraqi regime, he said."

There's a fair amount of merit to that argument. The faster and wider the Iraqi news cycle can run, the better. It has the potential to do exactly what it has for American society - reduce localization and increase national collaboration, and give voice to the relatively passive and intelligent majority to debate, rather than caving to the opinions of a radical local minority. Army of Davids, and all that fun stuff.

While of course none of this will happen instantaneously, there's just no excuse for not moving in that direction. Sure, even when the grid comes up most Iraqis probably won't have computers; that's another issue. But an expansion of electrical distribution would have the organic bonus of expanding the Iraqi news cycle, which in turn would enable the internet to become a serious tool of the people in Iraq later on.