General:

Some remarkably good news from Iraq

    By Jack Grant

From The Washington Post:

An overwhelming majority of Iraqis continue to say they intend to vote on Jan. 30 even as insurgents press attacks aimed at rendering the elections a failure, according to a new public opinion survey.

The poll, conducted in late December and early January for the International Republican Institute, found 80 percent of respondents saying they were likely to vote, a rate that has held roughly steady for months.

The 64 percent who said they were "very likely" to vote represented a dip of about 7 percentage points from a November survey, while those "somewhat likely" to vote increased 5 points.

Western specialists involved with election preparations said they were struck by the determination and resilience of ordinary Iraqis as they anticipate their country's first free election in half a century.

The terrorist insurgents' tactics have been obvious for most of the occupation, recently evolving into creating an atmosphere of fear to keep people from voting. It is remarkable that there are still such high numbers who say they intend to vote despite all the violence. Hopefully the feelings reflected in the opinion poll results bear fruit and enough people vote in Iraq to give the citizens of that country a feeling that the outcome of the election is legitimate. I am concerned about how the feeling within Iraq might be regarding the legitimacy of the resulting governmental assembly regardless of actual election turnout due to reports I have seen that a majority of Iraqis do not know who the different groupings running in the election are or what those groups stand for.

At this point, all we can do is hope for the best.

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Link through The Moderate Voice.

Posted by Jack Grant at 16:34 on 21 January 2005