MAR. 16, 2006: MY OWN IRAQ QUESTION Iraq may be a disorderly and violent place. But it is not west Africa. It seem that every Iraqi has a (working) cell phone. It seems that every building in Sadr City has a satellite dish – presumably connected to a TV. One hears no complaints of hunger and malnutrition. The streets are full of cars. (We’re told: 1 million more than before the war.) When you fly over rural Iraq, you see green farms, meaning that somebody has both an irrigation system and irrigation rights.
So my question is this: Where do Iraqis get their money? Corruption tends to enrich a well-placed few, not to put cell phones in the hands of everybody. And yet when I asked Americans in Iraq about the Iraqi private economy, everybody agreed that it must exist – but nobody seemed to know what precisely it was, how big it was, or how big it had been in the immediate past, to enable an assessment of whether it was growing and if so, how fast.
In the past, I have cited statistics here about Iraqi economic growth. I am baffled now how anybody could have generated them in the absence of so much information. On the other hand something is obviously going on. Any NRO readers have any insights?
http://frum.nationalreview.com/
::Tullycast:: 