WHY IRAQ WILL SUCCEED

An interesting analysis.

Iraq, McPherson says, has three assets most developing countries lack -- a large number of educated people, an entrepreneurial spirit, and oil.

All countries, McPherson says, have intelligent people. But Iraq, like some Eastern European nations as they emerged from Soviet domination, also has a sizable cadre of people who have received fine higher educations, especially in technical courses, most of them taught in English.

As Americans on the scene in Iraq have learned to their dismay, under Saddam Hussein's regime, with its focus on war-making and private enrichment, Iraq's infrastructure decayed much more than was understood by experts exercising their expertise from afar. That Iraq functioned as well as it did is, McPherson believes, partly because it has "an abundance of engineers who held things together with baling wire."

Iraq's second asset, what McPherson calls "an entrepreneurial spirit you can still feel," is a rarity -- a pleasant postwar surprise. It exists partly because of an unpleasant aspect of prewar Iraq -- pandemic corruption. That was a hard school, always in session, teaching participants how to operate in the interstices of rules and in the shadowy conditions of the black market. McPherson notes that unlike the Soviet Union, Saddam's Iraq never nationalized retailing, which was a whetstone that kept commercial skills sharp.