Government officials blamed the outage on insurgent attacks that toppled key power pylons in central Iraq and darkened broad swaths of the country, including its two largest cities, Baghdad and Basra...
Analysts also noticed that an insurgent attack hundreds of kilometres away from Iraq's export terminals was ominously able to strangle Iraq's lifeblood export...
For Iraq, the outage was expensive. It cost the national treasury some $60 million in lost revenue on daily earnings that average around $85 million, Qureshi said.
Obviously, the implications for oil exports were important. But more significantly, if the insurgency is so well-coordinated as to be able to shut down power throughout parts of both Baghdad and Basra simultaneously, then there's all the less prospect of other industries being able to develop meaningfully. And there can't be much doubt that the insurgents will realize they're on to something with attacks on an insufficiently secured power system.
As if that wasn't enough of a problem, the lights appear to be out on constitutional talks as well. By all indications, the Shiite and Kurdish factions are satisfied with the current draft constitution, while the Sunni faction wants no part of it.
The best option at this point is probably to take a step back from constitutional talks, but it looks like the majority wants to push ahead...which will only alienate all the more Sunnis and feed into the insurgency. Unfortunately that may be the lone growth industry in Iraq at the moment, especially if all other industries are stuck in the dark.
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