Guardian Unlimited | Life | Earth's neighbour passes by:

People in the south Pacific had the best view at the moment of closest encounter: it was their night, and they were nearest to Mars at the magic moment. British astronomers were hardly so lucky. 'Eleven this morning didn't feel any different from any other time. It was cloudy and Mars was the other side of the Earth,' said Robin Scagell, of the Society for Popular Astronomy and one of the promoters of national astronomy week.

This item has no significance except shameless gloating and southern hemisphere chauvinism. It's probably a good thing for all concerned I started this blog some months after watching last year's total eclipse from Cameron's Corner.

Atlantic Unbound | Politics & Prose | 2003.08.21:

That legitimacy hangs by a thread now, an Iraqi journalist told On Point. The U.S. occupation is too weak to restore order or maintain basic services, he says, yet oppressive enough to kill, injure, and inflame Iraqi civilians. In the months since the war Baghdad has become 'another Beirut,' a blow to Iraqi pride for which Iraqis blame the United States. And the situation is likely to get worse. The Financial Times reports that more than 3,000 Saudi young men have 'gone missing' in the past two months. Many crossed over into Iraq to mount a jihad against the occupation. More suicide bombings can be expected. More U.S. soldiers and Iraqi civilians will die. Meanwhile, in Afghanistan this week, the Taliban offensive against the Karzai government resulted in the deaths of ninety people, the worst span of violence in Afghanistan since the U.S. war against the Taliban ended, just as this week was the worst in Iraq since the war against Saddam. And yet pundits insist that George W. Bush is unassailable on foreign policy. After such success, what failure?

Also written before the Najaf massacre.

Al-Ahram Weekly | Against the occupation:

The focus on 'loyalists' rather than other possibilities seemed to indicate that the US team did not take seriously the claim of responsibility by the previously unknown 'Armed Vanguards of Mohamed's Second Army', a name suggesting an Islamist rather than a secular Ba'thist background.

The notion that the bombing of the Canal Hotel was an 'inside job' was based on the fact that the device exploded beneath the office of the UN's chief representative Sergio Vieira de Mello, who was killed along with more than 20 other staff members. However, it is just as likely that the bombers simply chose the only route open to the flatbed lorry which delivered the crude device made of a Russian bomb wired to explosives: the paved roadway into the parking lot alongside the UN compound wall. So far, none of the strikes on foreign troops and military facilities and sabotage operations against infrastructure have involved sophisticated intelligence, great military expertise or equipment beyond that available from Iraq's looted army stores.

It would seem that this is true, also, of the 7 August hit on the Jordanian Embassy in Baghdad as well as the UN bombing. This means that almost any of the resistance groups now operating in Iraq could have carried out the operation. Since armed resistance began at the time of the regime's collapse in early April, some three dozen groups have either claimed responsibility for attacks on the occupying forces and other targets or issued communiqu�s declaring their determination to take up arms against the occupation.

This was written before the Najaf bombing. Blaming the attacks on loyalists does not cure the problem. Stopping them would. If (as the Bush administration insists) there are enough troops, then it follows that the conduct of the occupation in using those troops must be sadly incompetent. If there are not enough troops then the Bush administration's war planning was ineffectual.

Guardian Unlimited | Shi'ite cleric killed in guerrilla attack:

Paul Bremer, the American leading Iraq's interim administration, pledged the US-British coalition would do 'everything possible' to track down the attackers.

He said: 'The bombing shows again that the enemies of the new Iraq will stop at nothing. Again, they have killed innocent Iraqis. Again, they have violated one of Islam's most sacred places. Again, by their heinous action, they have shown the evil face of terrorism.

'The Iraqi police have our full cooperation in this important investigation. On behalf of the Coalition Provisional Authority, the American people and all friends of Iraq, I express my deepest sympathy to the families of those killed and to the injured and their families.'

There has been considerable unrest among the religious communities in the holy city, which lies 110 miles south-west of Baghdad.

Today's bombing comes one week after a device exploded outside the house of one of Iraqi's most important Shia clerics, killing three guards and injuring 10 others including family members.

A gas cylinder, which had been placed along the outside wall of the home of Mohammed Saeed al-Hakim in Najaf, exploded just after noon prayers July 22.

The Al-Hakims are one of the most influential families in the Shia community in Iraq, and Iraqi newspapers reported two weeks ago that the cleric had received death threats.

This slaughter is incredibly bad news. Bremer's bromides are not going to reassure al-Hakim's followers in SCIRI. The Shi'a have been relatively quiet. SCIRI and al-Dawa, the principal Shi'a parties, both sit in the nongoverning council. THE CPA cannot protect the UN or its Iraqi allies. Perhaps presidential speeches and press conferences are not enough to establish security in Iraq.

More on this here and here.

Sydney Morning Herald | Lost, even with a map:

Australian political life reacted in silence this week as US military deaths in Iraq reached a melancholy milestone. On Tuesday morning a homemade bomb killed an American soldier north of Baghdad and wounded two others. His death, reported The New York Times, meant more US troops had now died keeping 'the peace' in Iraq than had died fighting 'the war'. The soldier was the 139th to die since May 1. That was the day George Bush declared, to orchestrated fanfare, the end of 'major combat operations'. A total of 138 had died in the six preceding weeks of the US/British invasion. Iraq's casualties, dead and wounded, military and civilian, were estimated to exceed 20,000.

Yet Iraq as an issue has all but vanished here. John Howard and Simon Crean, both burnt by flawed judgement, want to keep it that way. I'm not aware a politician anywhere, state or federal, had anything to say about the significance of Tuesday's death. Most newspapers ignored it, too. The seeming indifference says as much about the degradation of the Iraq debate as it does about perceptions of its electoral dangers. Any weapon of mass destruction (apart from US firepower) has still to be found anywhere. A coherent policy stance by Labor remains just as elusive. Howard's duplicity in taking Australia into the war damaged him as much as Crean's confused, man-for-all-seasons rhetoric hurt the Labor leader.

What will each say when Bush, as he surely must, scales back the US military occupation of Iraq - estimated at 120,000 troops, costing $US4 billion ($6.24 billion) a month - in a presidential election year next year? US policy has been no more successful in securing the peace than ever it was in justifying the invasion. As The New York Times editorialised on Wednesday: 'A stable peace in Iraq cannot be won on the cheap or absent foreign partners. With the death count mounting daily, it is time for Bush to stop pretending otherwise.' You'd like to think someone in the political leadership of this country would say something as sensible.

Instead, absolute silence.

What can I add?

The Independent | Blair's U-turn as he admits central role in naming Kelly:

What was decided at the meetings set off the chain of events that was to lead to the public exposure of Dr Kelly to an intense media spotlight, to his appearance before two parliamentary committees and to his death.

Mr Blair told the inquiry that he had been guided by senior civil servants over the affair. But he added:

The responsibility is mine, at the end of the day. I take the decision as Prime Minister, but I wanted to be able to say that we had played it by the book.

Just over five weeks ago, on learning of Dr Kelly's apparent suicide during an official flight from Shanghai to Hong Kong, the Prime Minister had 'categorically' and 'emphatically' denied he had played a part in revealing the scientist's name.

Mr Blair, his ministers and spokesmen had subsequently declared that the Ministry of Defence had been left to handle Dr Kelly after he volunteered the fact that he had discussed last September's Iraq dossier with Mr Gilligan.

Four days after Dr Kelly was discovered dead in an Oxfordshire wood, the Prime Minister's official spokesman was still insisting that the MoD was the 'lead department' in working out the strategy over Dr Kelly and that this had been done under 'normal MoD procedure'.

The fundamental hurdle to calling John Howard to account in the same way is that his formulation would be:

The responsibility is not mine, at the end of the day. I take the decision as Prime Minister, but I wanted to be able to say that we had played it by the book which no-one told me about and I certainly did not read.

Eschaton | Arnie on Gay Marriage:

Gay marriage is something that should be between a man and a woman.

Wow...

Dubious Dossier Fueled Bush Deceits:

Britain's independent investigation, led by Lord Hutton, a respected senior jurist, was launched to answer questions about the death of David Kelly, a British expert on chemical and biological weapons, who helped reporters expose the Blair team's manipulation of intelligence data. But it has turned into a broad examination that is considering information not merely regarding Kelly but the whole question of how Blair and his aides made the case for war.

Last Tuesday, Hutton released copies of e-mails revealing that Blair's chief of staff, Jonathan Powell, cautioned against using the dossier to claim Iraq posed anything akin to 'an imminent threat.' After reviewing the evidence, Powell e-mailed top members of the prime minister's team to argue that the information 'does nothing to demonstrate a threat, let alone an imminent threat from Saddam.'

The prime minister's chief of staff found the evidence on which the dossier was based so thin that he said it would only be 'convincing for those who are prepared to be convinced.'

Blair and his top aides chose to disregard the cautions and hyped the dossier with claims that it confirmed Iraq's WMD program was 'active, detailed and growing.' Even after U.S. intelligence agencies warned that the dossier was of questionable validity, Bush peddled the dubious data.

This week's revelations about the extent to which Blair and his aides massaged and manipulated the intelligence data should suggest to members of the U.S. Congress that it is time for the United States to again follow the lead of Britain. Congress should authorize a full investigation to determine whether, in the midst of a debate about war and peace, Bush and his cohorts chose to deceive Congress and the American people.

Perhaps Australia, as well, should be conducting a slightly more dynamic enquiry than the closed doors exercise in the Parliamentary Joint Committee on ASIO, ASIS and DSD. They might even consider the national security implications of the prime minister's alarming incapacity for getting the memo.

Blog Left: Critical Interventions Warblog | Claims about WMD 'may have been excuse rather than reason for war' :

Here's a British intelligence chief scathingly attacking Blair misuse of intelligence and correctly stating that Bush and Blair were looking for excuses for a war they'd already chosen to carry out, rather than offering reasons for war. He also notes that the war itself in effect began in Fall 2002:

In his note to the committee, written on 2 July, Sir John suggests that the change in the no-fly zone operations from defensive to offensive tactics last autumn was because the US and UK had already decided to 'prepare the battlefield' by removing threats such as Iraq's Silkworm missiles. 'It points to a question that needs to be posed,' he wrote. 'When was the decision taken to go to war? If this thesis bears examination, then the nation was committed to war in the late summer, early autumn of 2002.

Okay, let's all check the dates that the Man of Steel suddenly invented predeployment but promised (cross his heart and spit to die) that predeployment did not mean that we'd decided to join the war.

Link via Bad Attitudes

Salon.com | Joe Conason's Journal:

In the meantime, I will appear on CNN's 'Crossfire' today with guest host Al Franken. Among other things, I hope we can discuss the new slogan I've suggested for Fox News Channel, drawn from the wording of Judge Denny Chin's decision in the network's lawsuit against Franken and his publisher. Instead of 'Fair and Balanced,' why not 'Wholly Without Merit'?

Not quite vitriolic enough to make a snark of the week, but really not too bad.

Sydney Morning Herald | Time came above safety: inquiry head:

The State Rail Authority might have overlooked safety concerns over the Tangara deadman pedal because of concern with 'on-time running and things of that nature', the Waterfall inquiry commissioner, the retired judge Peter McInerney, said yesterday.

Hearing submissions from counsel on the causes of the crash on January 31 that killed seven people, he said he noted that vigilance control devices were now being put on Tangaras operating outside the metropolitan area.

The devices - alarms triggered if controls are not operated within a given time - are being installed as a back-up to deadman system.

Mr McInerney has heard that the authority made on-time running its top priority, disciplining drivers for being late and possibly deciding not to fit Tangaras with vigilance control devices earlier because it would have temporarily taken them out of service.

He said yesterday: 'Now the horse has bolted, they are fitting the devices, so there is no reason for them not to have been fitted in the 1990s.'

Same old, same old. From gungho staff meetings at the SRA to White House idiocies on Iraq and global warming, for some reason unbalanced managerialism produces really bad results. Perhaps we need to be really old-fashioned and fall back to using checks and balances rather than trusting the CEO on everything.

The implicit claim of managerialism is that the moral quality of the leader is the only thing that matters. That is an old, old assertion with surprising roots:

The conscience of a moral personality is a far greater protection against the misuse of an office than is the supervision of parliament or the separation of powers. I know no one who has a stronger conscience, or is more true to his people, than...

Bush's Messiah Complex | February 2003 issue:

There's also the risk that Bush is so convinced that God's on our side that he may commit a blunder of horrifying proportions.

In a democracy, the fateful decisions of war and peace are not supposed to rest in the hands of one man. Today, they do. And what a man to entrust them with. Lacking intellectual curiosity, he boasts of an infallible gut. Desperate not to be trapped by 'the vision thing' that ensnared his father, Bush embraces a huge global mission and couches it in fundamentalist language. And he has assigned the Pentagon the primary role in carrying out this mission.

This is way too much power to give to anyone, and George W. Bush has the arrogance that comes with such power. 'I do not need to explain why I say things,' he told Woodward. 'That's the interesting thing about being the President. Maybe somebody needs to explain to me why they say something, but I don't feel like I owe anybody an explanation.'

When his crusade goes terribly wrong, as it is likely to do, Bush will owe a lot of people an explanation. Meanwhile, we must do whatever we can, nonviolently, to oppose this military messianism.

Neoliberalism is morphing into a new Byzantium. Byzantine emperors were regularly acclaimed as 'isapostolikos' and 'cosmocrator' - equal of the apostles and ruler of the world. Because the emperor was Christ-appointed any unsuccessful attempt at his overthrow was not just treason but apostasy. Success meant only that Christ had elected a new emperor. Bush claims to have been appointed by God.

When Margaret Thatcher first declared that there is no alternative to certain policies she laid the intellectual foundation for this nonsense. Bush effectively declares that there is no alternative to one person, himself. Further he ignores traditional Christian authorities such as the Vatican or the leadership of his own church in favour of his own direct relationship with God. That strikes me, apart from being very bad politics, as simple blasphemy.

Link courtesy of Orcinus.

Fundamental breach of ministerial code! Nation in shock!

It now seems that Leader of the House and Minister of Workplace Relations Tony Abbott founded an organisation called Australians for Honest Politics to bring down Pauline Hanson. In a gross breach of the Man of Steel's extraordinary standards for ministerial conduct AHP has not yet issued the required declaration that whatever it was they thought they were doing they certainly did not inform the prime minister.

Canberra insiders expect Abbott's dismissal within the hour. The embattled minister, ever a man of many parts, is reported to be flogging a screenplay based on this exciting saga.

Whether Baz Luhrmann really wants to be produce a sexed up version of the Alexandre Dumas classic is unknown. Abbott, meanwhile, is reportedly confident that The Woman in the Rubber Thongs will prove a worldwide hit.

Sydney Morning Herald | Rein in that Mars frenzy - it's still 55 million kilometres away:

NSW has a wealth of small observatories open to the public.

The astronomy enthusiasts who run them, inundated with inquiries about viewing Mars, are treading a delicate balance between encouraging excitement at the closest approach of the planet in recorded history and providing a realistic view about what people can expect to see down a telescope.

Peter Neilson, manager of Dubbo Observatory, said he made a point of showing people pictures first, so they knew what to look for. In the case of Mars, this was the glow of the polar caps, and the black marking of three volcanoes.

'Any level of interest in astronomy is good. But it's a matter of expectation,' he said.

Well, Peter's observatory and the Mars perigee are my excuse for visiting Dubbo. Peter told me Dubbo has been hit by Mars frenzy. It was great. And the sheep were nervous.

On Line Opinion 25/8/03 | Graham Young argues that Pauline Hanson got off lightly :

Hanson pleaded not guilty but the jury unanimously disagreed. Once the verdict had been reached the only question left to judge Patsy Wolfe was the length of sentence. She determined it should be three years - the length of a parliamentary term.

In making the sentence the judge had reference to four previous judgements. The most comparable was the decision of the Appeal Court in The Queen v Karen Lynn Ehrmann. Ehrmann falsely enrolled 24 people on the state electoral roll with the intention of using them in an internal ALP ballot. Ehrmann pleaded guilty. She was sentenced to three years with a recommendation for early release after nine months.

In terms of proportionality, Hanson's crime was greater. Ehrmann pleaded guilty and showed some remorse, Hanson did neither. You'd have to say that Patsy Wolfe's call was a pretty fair one. She even allowed Hanson's position as a Member of Parliament as a mitigating factor. I would have thought that it should have been the reverse - Hanson should have been held to a higher standard. Hanson's supporters say she should have escaped sentence because she repaid the money. Well, yes, she did, but only when she had been caught. If she hadn't repaid then she may have been sentenced to six years in jail, as in the case of Lockhart (see who misappropriated $390,000.

Hard as it is to argue with Young's opinion on the Hanson sentence the Australian media has succeeded in doing it. For example on the ABC's Insiders last Sunday we heard breathless speculation that if a major party figure had received a similar sentence...

Well, sadly for the researchers at the ABC a major figure has. The same factual bungle has dominated the airwaves since the Hanson sentence was first announced.

Sydney Morning Herald | Don't cry for a sleazy grub:

And for the record, remember that Hanson, when elected to the Federal Parliament in March 1996, did so still as the candidate of the Liberal Party, even though John Howard, in a panic, insisted she be disendorsed after some of her blunt views on Aborigines and Asians surfaced in a local newspaper interview during the campaign. But her expulsion had come too late to affect her official status on the 70,000 ballot papers which already had been printed. And on these she was still listed, on polling day, as the Liberal candidate. The nonsense later that Hanson was elected as an independent has only been just that: nonsense.

The Liberals might have disowned her but she went into the ballot box on polling day as the Liberals' only identified candidate. And that is what got her elected. Thirty-one months later, in the October 1998 general election, Hanson switched from the outer Brisbane seat of Oxley to the nearby seat of Blair under the One Nation banner. It didn't help. She led on primary votes but lost on preferences to the Liberal candidate. In 2001 Hanson ran for a Queensland Senate seat and failed there, too. And in the recent NSW state election she was defeated a third time.

The national convulsion over Hanson's imprisonment shook even the remote fastnesses of the Golden West of New South Wales, where I've been for the last week. The one thing that I suspect has not been said is that if you commit a crime out of sheer idiocy, the forensic tactic is clear - you plead guilty, throw yourself on the mercy of the court, and try to make a case that there are actually people in the world capable of defrauding half a million dollars by mistake.

Hanson always struck me as more a vehicle for disaffection than anything else and the most extraordinary part of the Hanson saga is that the idiocy defence might well have been a true account of events.

Blacking out the mandate of Heaven

From Maxspeak:

The suspicion that the blackout was a karma payoff for the failure to restore electrical service in Iraq may have a more than metaphorical truth to it. Occupied Iraq begins to look like a blueprint for the future of occupied North America under the auspices of "Neo-con Edison" and faith-based transmission systems.

The conventional wisdom seems (rightly in my opinion, to be settling on underinvestment in the US electricity grid as explanation for their blackout. George Bush who (as we know) advocates privatisation is suddenly involved enough in power transmission issues to support measures he has previously opposed. Indeed he's so passionate about political electrical power that he seems to have forgotten that he ever opposed a bill to modernise the grid.

When Sydney had a water contamination crisis in 1998, no-one ever thought of holding the board of directors of Sydney Water responsible. the government dealt with it and Sydney Water did as they were told. It's the great weakness of privatisation, in a crisis public action becomes necessary.

Failing hydraulic works were bad news for the Son of Heaven. Blackouts are bad news for a president appointed by God. The reasons for it being bad news are the same in both examples.

Guardian Unlimited Politics | David Clark: Iraq has wrecked our case for humanitarian wars:

The gap here could scarcely be wider. Humanitarian interventionists aspire to a world order based on the universal and disinterested pursuit of justice. Neo-conservatives are motivated by the selective and self-interested pursuit of their own geopolitical goals. This rapaciously ideological project starts from the proposition that the American social and economic mode represents the ideal form to which all other forms must ultimately comply. In what the neo-cons call this 'distinctly American internationalism', US national interests and the interests of humanity are indivisible. It remains to be seen what happens when this assumption collides with the reality of an Iraq determined to make choices that conflict with the White House.

As long as US power remains in the hands of the Republican right, it will be impossible to build a consensus on the left behind the idea that it can be a power for good. Those who continue to insist that it can, risk discrediting the concept of humanitarian intervention and thereby render impossible the task of mobilising the international community to act in the future. Indeed, the backlash has already started. At last month's conference on progressive governance, the assembled leaders rejected the section of Blair's draft communique supporting the principle that the responsibility to protect trumps state sovereignty.

The problem is this: the interventionists who supported the Iraq war want those of us who didn't to believe that George Bush is a 'useful idiot' in the realisation of Blair's humanitarian global vision. We can only see truth in the opposite conclusion.

I supported East Timor. I supported Afghanistan. I support the Solomons. I think The responsibility to protect has the balance right. Iraq does not meet the threshold conditions laid out in that report. No last resort. No right authority. No reasonable prospects. What we end up with is a failing occupation built on half-truths and whole lies executed by a bungling cabal who believe the facts on the ground do not matter as long as the spin in Washington falls in their favour.

And the international consensus for the responsibility to protect that was built in Kosovo has been shattered in Iraq. We cannot blame Bush, Howard or the neocons for the shattered consensus. It was all Blair's doing and will almost certainly prove his undoing.

Power Outage Traced To Dim Bulb In White House:

Is tonight's black-out a surprise? Heck, no, not to us in the field who've watched Bush's buddies flick the switches across the globe. In Brazil, Houston Industries seized ownership of Rio de Janeiro's electric company. The Texans (aided by their French partners) fired workers, raised prices, cut maintenance expenditures and, CLICK! the juice went out so often the locals now call it, 'Rio Dark.'

So too the free-market cowboys of Niagara Mohawk raised prices, slashed staff, cut maintenance and CLICK! -- New York joins Brazil in the Dark Ages.

Californians have found the solution to the deregulation disaster: re-call the only governor in the nation with the cojones to stand up to the electricity price fixers. And unlike Arnold Schwarzenegger, Gov. Gray Davis stood alone against the bad guys without using a body double. Davis called Reliant Corp of Houston a pack of 'pirates' --and now he'll walk the plank for daring to stand up to the Texas marauders.

So where's the President? Just before he landed on the deck of the Abe Lincoln, the White House was so concerned about our brave troops facing the foe that they used the cover of war for a new push in Congress for yet more electricity deregulation. This has a certain logic: there's no sense defeating Iraq if a hostile regime remains in California.

Sitting in the dark, as my laptop battery runs low, I don't know if the truth about deregulation will ever see the light --until we change the dim bulb in the White House.

Auckland also had major power problems after their system as rescued from the fat and bloated public sector and handed over to the lean and hungry private sector. Meanwhile back in Oz, we are trying to establish a nationwide electricity grid even though the huge distances between major population centres make efficient transmission an order of magnitude less efficient than in the US. The productivity commission itself accepts losses on the order of 5-10%, but mere physical reality does not constrain an economic rationalist in full flight. Nor, apparently, does the complex system problem.

ABCNEWS.com : Iraqis Offer Tips Over U.S. Blackout:

Here is a top 10 list compiled on the streets of Baghdad:

10: SLEEP ON THE ROOF. Without power and hence without air conditioning Iraqis have taken to climbing up stairs in the hot nights. Some install metal bed frames on rooftops, while others simply stretch out on thin mattresses. 'We sleep on the roof,' said Hadia Zeydan Khalaf, 38, wearing a black head-to-toe abaya in the hot sun. 'It's cooler there.'

9: SIT IN THE SHADE. Many Iraqis go outside when the power's off. 'We sit in the shade,' said George Ruweid, 27, playing cards with friends on the sidewalk. Of the U.S. blackout, he said: 'I hope it lasts for 20 years. Let them feel our suffering.'

8: HEAD FOR THE WATER. 'We go to the river, just like in the old days,' said Saleh Moayet, 53. Several people said they had seen American beaches on television, and suggested they might be a good place to sit out the blackout. 'They have so many beautiful beaches,' said Hamid Khelil, 44. 'They should go where it isn't so hot.'

7: SHOWER FREQUENTLY. 'I take showers all day,' said Raed Ali, 33. 'Before I go up to the roof to sleep, I take a shower and I'm cooler.'

6: BUY BLOCKS OF ICE. When refrigerators shut down, there's no better way to keep food cool. Mohammed Abdul Zahara, 24, sells about 20 a day from a roadside table. 'When it's hot people buy a lot of ice,' he said.

5: CHECK FOR BITTER-ENDERS. 'They should go to the power stations and see what the problem is,' suggested Ahmed Abdul Hussein, 21. 'Maybe there are followers of Saddam Hussein who are sabotaging their power stations. That's what happens here.'

4: GET A GENERATOR. Abbas Abdul al-Amir, 53, has one of a long row of shops selling generators in Baghdad's Karadah shopping street. When the power goes out, sales go up. 'I sell about 30 generators a day,' he said. 'When the shutdown lasts I can sell even more.'

3: CALL IN THE IRAQIS. Some suggested the Americans ask the Iraqis how to get the power going again. 'Let them take experts from Iraq,' said Alaa Hussein, 32, waiting in a long line for gas because there was no electricity for the pumps. 'Our experts have a lot of experience in these matters.'

2: USE FOUL LANGUAGE. 'When the power goes out, I curse everybody,' said Emad Helawi, a 63-year-old accountant. 'I curse God. I curse Saddam Hussein. And I curse the Americans.'

And the No. 1 suggestion among Iraqis for Americans suffering without power: TAKE TO THE STREETS. Some said demonstrations can be effective in persuading authorities to turn on the switch. 'We held protests. After that we had fewer blackouts,' Ahmed Abdul Hussein said without even a hint of sarcasm. 'I'd suggest Americans go out and demonstrate.'

See This is not a blog for what Iraqis might think when restoring power in the US takes 24 hours and in Iraq takes 4 months.