ARE CARS REALLY PROGRESS?:

Honk! The quiet progress of Iraq.: Many Iraqi families have been able to afford cars as the government has doubled the salary of its million or so workers. (David R. Francis, 12/30/04, CS Monitor)

You can tell things are changing in Iraq by the traffic. Thousands of families have bought used cars from abroad - clogging city streets and boosting smog. Many Iraqi families have been able to afford the cars - and move from poverty to middle-class respectability - because the government has doubled the salary of its million or so workers.

It's a sign that, despite the daily mayhem caused by the insurgency, Iraq's economy is quietly gearing up from its war-time low in 2003. How quickly it's picking up speed - and whether the momentum is adequate to dampen the insurgency by providing jobs for idle Iraqi men - is hotly contested. What's clear is that oil alone won't turn the tide: Small business and manufacturing need to revive.

Iraq's economy has expanded 40 to 50 percent this year from war-depressed 2003, says Alan Larson, undersecretary for economics in the US State Department. He predicts double-digit growth in 2005.

The irony of course is that an infrastructure as deteriorated and destroyed as Iraq's gives a nation a golden opportunity to rebuild in the most modern fashion and leap ahead of its competition, as Japan and Germany did after WWII. The question is whether the Shi'a can seize the opportunity.

Posted by Orrin Judd at December 31, 2004 8:36 AM