Still, one measure of the modest expectations surrounding Iraqi oil are prices on the world oil markets. Global prices dropped sharply when traders realized that American forces would win a fairly quick victory and that the oil fields were not going to be destroyed by Saddam.
Since then, prices have climbed back to relatively high levels, about US$26.50 a barrel, as traders scaled back their expectations of big output here and scaled up their expectations of global demand.
The bigger question is whether foreign investment and normal domestic business activity accelerate. In Baghdad, most stores have reopened, but many if not most of those stores close well before 5pm for fear of being robbed by the increasingly brazen thieves who now roam the city.
"Initially, investment will come from highly entrepreneurial companies," said Frederick Barton, an analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. "The bigger players are much talked about, but their projects are more complicated."
Barton said business insurers are still reluctant to insure investments in Iraq. But he added that merchants and traders have already jumped to bring in imported goods from nearby countries and that Turkish trucking executives are expecting traffic into and out of Iraq to be twice as much through next month as it was for all of last year.
"From the beginning, I don't think people were counting on oil money to get the country moving again," said Hashim Hamandi, a vice president at JP Morgan Chase & Co and a founder of the Iraqi Economic Institute, a nonprofit association of Iraqi economists and business executives in New York.
That said, Hamandi predicted that foreign investment would accelerate dramatically in the coming months as people become more confident about security here.
For the immediate future, Hamandi and other experts believe that most of the private investment here will come from Iraq's roughly 4 million expatriates in the US, Europe and neighboring countries in the Persian Gulf.
Entrepreneurs throughout the Persian Gulf region are beginning to salivate over the money to be made in Iraqi reconstruction and in new opportunities. But entrepreneurs in Iraq are bracing for tough times.
Companies that often knew no competition from imports, including many in the food industry, are already finding that they cannot compete against a rising flood of imports from Iran, Jordan and Abu Dhabi.
If the experience of companies in post-communist countries provides any guide, many, if not most, of Iraq's manufacturing companies will be lucky to survive as anything more than a shadow of their former selves, as they scramble to replace outdated technology.
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