Electoral intimidation

Iraq continues to remain a tough battle, one we claim to be winning while claiming the insurgents are weakening and becoming more desperate. While we may not be intimated by the violence in Iraq, it seems the Iraqi people are:

Three militant groups warned Iraqis against voting in Jan. 30 elections, saying Thursday that people participating in the "dirty farce" risked attack. All 700 employees of the electoral commission in Mosul reportedly resigned after being threatened.

The insurgents also seem to be having an effect on economic growth in the area:

Remove the output in the Kurdish areas of Iraq, where the insurgency has not disrupted production, and the national growth figures would be dramatically lower, maintains David Phillips, a senior fellow in New York at the Council on Foreign Relations.

"Petty" business, trading in goods and services, has been revived, says Mr. Phillips, who was a State Department adviser to its Future of Iraq project before resigning in protest because of the administration's Iraq policy. But because of the uncertainties in Iraq, he wonders if foreign investors will pour in money.

Phillips sees unemployment in Iraq at around 50 percent, up to 80 percent if under-employment is included.

Official numbers put unemployment at about 25 percent.

"We are in need of creating jobs," admits Hilal Aboud al-Bayati, economic adviser to interim Prime Minister Iyad Allawi. He says the government is giving Iraqi contractors several smaller projects for roads, sewage, and water supply that should create more jobs.

The speed of growth is crucial. Economic progress is "too slow" to reduce unemployment enough to have much impact on the insurgency problem, says Michael O'Hanlon, an economist at the Brookings Institution in Washington. Outside the oil sector, "not much is being produced."

So the claim is that once the Iraqi people vote, which some of them are to afraid to do, that the insurgency will start to end, even though the enviroment they create causes economic conditions that seem to favor the development of more insurgents.

Tell me again how voting is going to fix these problems?