What A Barone!

The Bush blog is highlighting this quote from conventional wisdom bore Michael Barone:

What is remarkable about our occupation of Iraq is not that it has gone badly but that it has gone so well. Last week, crude oil production was above target level, the central bank signed up for the payment system used by central banks internationally, and 140,000 Iraqi police and law enforcement officers were on duty. A new Iraqi currency is circulating, and schools are open. Wages are rising, interest rates are falling, businesses are opening and hiring. Millions of Iraqis are buying cellphones, TVs, and satellite dishes.

Barone must be paying Ahmed Chalabi for his information, because it's not quite accurate:

After years of wars, sanctions and mismanagement, Iraq's gross domestic product hovers around $1,000 per person, according to the 2004 Iraq budget - about the same as North Korea's or Mozambique's. (The United States' GDP is about $37,600 per person.) That means most Iraqis live hand to mouth, with few luxuries.

Unemployment is down - but from 60 percent to a still-whopping 28 percent, according to the planning ministry.

Underemployment is chronic. Iraq may have the world's best-educated taxi drivers and waiters.

"All I want is a job in my field," said Musadeq Mohammed, 28, a chemical engineer, who makes $200 a month working 10-hour shifts, seven days a week, waiting tables at Baghdad's Saj al Reef restaurant.

The consumer boom, while real, is the province of a relatively tiny elite. Iraqis who make the typical wages of $150 a month are not buying 36-inch TVs and $20 boxes of Swiss chocolates being sold in Baghdad's Karada neighborhood.

...

Glistening new storefronts selling newly available cell-phone service have sprouted around Baghdad, but there are only about 300,000 cell phones in use in a country of 25 million people, according to the Coalition Provisional Authority, the postwar U.S.- and British-led caretaker administration of Iraq. Mohammed, for one, cannot afford the $200 up-front cost.

Maybe they're buying the phones, but using them as paperweights.

Interestingly, the Bush blog left out the very next sentence from Barone:

Attacks on Americans have greatly diminished, and attacks on Iraqis are likely to turn them against terrorists rather than against us.

Not even Bush blog readers would swallow that one.

Update (3/15): Inky link no longer hinky.

Update (3/16): See comments.