Not just its size and scope make the Iraqi reconstruction effort unusual. Administratively, it is also unlike anything else in recent history. In the electrical sector alone, four bureaucracies have a major role. At the top of this list is Iraq's Ministry of Electricity, the huge and monolithic government agency that, in theory at least, is responsible for everything related to electricity in the country, from running power plants to sending out bills.

Today, the Ministry of Electricity is one of several Iraqi agencies working primarily with three U.S. government organizations to operate, maintain, and improve Iraq's infrastructure. Two of these three U.S. organizations are temporary agencies created by a presidential directive in May 2004. One is the Iraqi Reconstruction Management Office (IRMO), which is part of the U.S. State Department. The other is the Iraq Project and Contracting Office (PCO), which was created specifically to oversee the $18.4 billion set aside by Congress in the fall of 2003 for Iraq's reconstruction. The PCO was recently absorbed into the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which had previously had a separate presence in Iraq.

IRMO staffers, working in the huge diplomatic maze in Saddam's vast former palace in Baghdad, advise key officials at such Iraqi ministries as Interior, Oil, and Electricity. They help them develop plans and strategies, set priorities, monitor spending, and coordinate with the U.S. military. The PCO, meanwhile, oversees contracting for big projects and supplies. But it is the IRMO, working with Iraqi officials, that has final say over how reconstruction money is being allocated. And in any case, the PCO, though now part of the Army Corps of Engineers, reports to the U.S. ambassador in Baghdad. So, ultimately, no large U.S.-funded projects can be undertaken in Iraq without the approval of the State Department.

The third U.S. bureaucracy involved in Iraqi reconstruction is the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), the government office created in 1961 to oversee nonmilitary foreign humanitarian efforts.

The huge reconstruction effort is divided not only by agencies but also by sectors and components within sectors. In the electricity sector, there are separate generation, transmission, and distribution components. Many of the most important generating projects have been under the auspices of the PCO; for many of these, the supervisory contractor has been a company called the Iraq Power Alliance [see sidebar, "Who's Who Among Electrical Contractors in Iraq"]. It is a joint venture of the engineering firms WorleyParsons Ltd., in Sydney, Australia, and Parsons Brinckerhoff Ltd., in London.

The engineering firms working in Iraq are among the world's best. The fees they've been awarded are huge even by the standards of big-project engineering. The engineers they've sent to Iraq are capable, hard-working, and often incredibly courageous, as I saw for myself during a 10-day stay in which I was granted access as unrestricted as the security situation allowed.

So, nearly three years after reconstruction began, why does Iraq's electrical infrastructure still fall short by 4000 MW?

There are a lot of reasons. Here are the fundamental ones:

• A poor match between generating technologies and the kinds of fuels available in Iraq.

• A well-armed insurgency that has made destroying electrical infrastructure a centerpiece of its bid to destroy the country's fledgling democracy.

• Revenue levels coming into the Ministry of Electricity that are so low as to be insignificant, a function of a ruinously low rate structure and far too few electric meters actually recording how much power people are using.

• Management and personnel problems at all levels of the government, including the ministry, which is generally believed to have thousands of fictitious employees created for the sole purpose of getting a paycheck cashed by someone else.

• The erosion of operational and, particularly, maintenance skills among workers at the country's Ministry of Electricity.

On our way to the Quds power plant, we pass through Baghdad's northern outskirts in a three-car convoy. It's 9:30 in the morning on a sunny but not oppressively hot autumn day, and men, women, and children are out on the streets. Some of the women wear dark chadors, the traditional Islamic robes; some do not. Along the roadside here and there, vendors sit by big piles of watermelons or amid arrays of black plastic jugs of gasoline.

Traffic is moderately heavy. Jim Hawkins, an Army major sitting next to me in the armored Toyota Land Cruiser, points out a white-and-orange sedan whose tail is jacked up unusually high. It might be a future car bomb, he says. The improvised bombs made by the insurgents are heavy and are often based on explosives from artillery shells. So to avoid the suspicion that a car with a sagging tail end would arouse, insurgents often jack up the rear suspension of a car before they put a bomb in its trunk.

Behind me, I hear an occasional crack as one of the security team in the trailing Land Cruiser fires a pin flare into the road or a rifle shot into the air, warning an approaching vehicle to back off.

We come upon a traffic jam that seems to extend ahead for several kilometers at least (we can't see it at the time, but there's an Iraqi military checkpoint up ahead). With hardly any hesitation, our convoy swoops at high speed across the median to the other side of the highway, with traffic going in the opposite direction. Our driver, a young, thin, silent Brit in dark glasses, known as Fish, plunges into oncoming traffic. Happily enough, it makes way for us. "This is the first time I've ever done this sober," I joke nervously to Hawkins, who is unfazed.

In the vicinity of the Quds complex, I notice several towering flare stacks across the street from the power plant, at an oil field called East Baghdad. Atop one of the stacks, an enormous orange flame indicates that natural gas pouring out of the oil deposits is being burned off steadily to keep it from exploding. Such flaring goes on continually all over Iraq. It is so widespread in the huge southern oil fields west of Basra that it actually fills the night sky with light.

The flaring is notable because if all that gas were captured, pressurized, and distributed rather than being burned off, it could be used to meet more than half of Iraq's demand for electricity. At the moment, Iraq is flaring more than 28 million cubic meters of gas a day. It's enough to fire at least 4000 MW of electricity.

The gas is sorely needed. Most of the generating units installed or refurbished so far during reconstruction—40 out of a total of about 57—are based on combustion turbines. They run optimally only when being fueled by natural gas, which few of them are at the moment. The rest are running on diesel fuel or heavy derivatives of crude oil left over after the more desirable fuel grades are separated out in refining.

Those more desirable grades of crude are shipped out of Iraq, to bring desperately needed revenues into the country. And the Ministry of Electricity pays the Ministry of Oil only a small fraction of the world-market price for the fuels it needs to generate electricity. Thus, the Electricity Ministry must be content with whatever it can get, and generally what it gets are fuels that few other utilities in the world would be willing to burn.

"The fuel situation is a mess," says Keith W. Crane, senior economist at the Rand Corp.'s Washington office. He was an advisor to Ambassador L. Paul Bremer, the civil administrator of Iraq after the war. "There are no prices, no incentives, nothing."

Diesel fuel, which isn't produced in sufficient quantities in Iraq, is trucked to the generating plants from Turkey at great cost. But that obstacle is nothing compared with the problems of the heavy fuels, including something called Bunker C, which powers a lot of Iraq's generating plants. Even under the best circumstances, a PCO generation specialist in Iraq tells me, a combustion turbine running on crude oil or diesel fuel requires two or three times as much maintenance as one running on natural gas. And present-day Iraq isn't an example of the best circumstances.

Before these heavy fuels can be burned in a combustion turbine, they have to be treated with a substance called an inhibitor to mitigate the effects of elements like vanadium that would damage the turbine blades. The inhibitor binds the vanadium to magnesium, to keep the vanadium from corroding the blades. Unfortunately, the resulting compounds are deposited on the turbine blades. So the units have to be taken out of service every week to have their blades cleaned.

"To buy inhibitor, in dollars per liter, is more expensive than crude," one engineer tells me. "Last summer," he goes on, "we bought all the inhibitor on the shelf in the world for a four-month supply in Iraq. Let me put it in simple terms: nobody's dumb enough to do what we're doing."

Iraq's 110 combustion turbines alone could in theory generate well over 4000 MW if they were being fueled by natural gas. So far, though, the actual output of these combustion turbine generators hasn't come close to half of that figure. At Quds, I begin to understand why.