U.S. Missteps Leave Iraqis in the Dark

The delays, however, resulted in millions of angry Iraqis having to sweat through the summer.

"We started it much too late," Thompson said.

Most of the power projects that were completed, U.S. officials said, have been poorly operated by the Iraqis, who before the invasion relied heavily on foreign contractors to run the plants.

By one U.S. estimate, Iraq would have an additional 1,000 megawatts of power if all of its 19 plants, with 142 generators, were run correctly.

To help remedy the problem, USAID sent scores of Iraqi engineers abroad for training as part of a multimillion-dollar effort to create "tiger teams" that would return and train other Iraqis.

Instead, the engineers were dispersed to different plants when they returned and provided very little training, reconstruction officials said.

"We put the tiger teams out there, but we never got anything out of them," Karns said.

There have been some successes. The larger problems of the power sector don't seem to have trickled down to the Khor Zubayr plant south of Basra, which will be the last to go online.

Chris Frabott, an Army Corps official, has spent the last several months installing two mammoth generators. If all goes as planned, they will actually use natural gas piped in from a nearby oil field.

The plant was abuzz with work one day last summer. More than 400 Iraqi workers were employed at the site, which sits alone in the middle of flat, barren desert.

When the plant goes online Thursday, it will deliver 500 megawatts of power to Iraq -- about 10% of current capacity. Frabott looked up at one of the generators and patted its side.

"It's a lot of work," he said. "A lot of money."