Iraq insurgents send a message

At this point, Iraq is still without a constitutional government.  Has this impacted the region and does it have any relationship to the insurgent attacks?
There is no doubt that the power vacuum that exists here with the absence of the government being formed more than 10 weeks after the January elections feeds the insurgency.

People here feel disillusioned with democracy because they have not seen a government put in place, and as such, are perhaps still more fearing of insurgents and are less ready to bring out information to the coalition forces about them. 

We have seen an increase in information to U.S. military and Iraqi police hotlines, but certainly the feeling on the ground here is if the government is put in place and people can see a constitution on its way, that will be emboldened to isolate the insurgents. 

Clearly at the moment [the insurgents] are able to feed off the doubts of the Iraqi people, who are frankly very disappointed and frustrated that they still don’t have a government in place.

Al-Jazeera broadcast a video on Wednesday of an American hostage. How will the American government handle this hostage situation?
The U.S. Embassy here first told us the contractor, who was working here on a project in the center of Baghdad, went missing on Monday. Yesterday we received this video tape that had been released by his kidnappers. 

The U.S. Embassy is working very hard, as it always does, in trying to establish who the kidnappers might be and coordinating any kind of information they can with the family of the man involved, Jeffrey Ake, and the company which he represented. 

But the officials' hands are tied as to how much further they can go in dealing with these militants. It’s always possible that the kidnappers might be trying to demand money; that's something which the government and its representatives cannot be seen to be involved with in any shape or form. 

The other rather vague demands of the kidnappers, which were expressed through the words of Mr. Ake himself in that video — that American troops should withdraw from Iraq — are clearly not ones that can be listened to either. However, they are doing whatever they can to establish the identity of the group. 

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