The Boom Outside Baghdad

Amir Taheri wrote in New York Post When the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank reported two years ago that the Iraqi economy was heading for a boom, skeptics dismissed it as misplaced optimism. Now, however, even some of those who opposed the toppling of Saddam Hussein admit that many Iraqis share that optimism. Newsweek has just hailed the emergence of a booming market economy in Iraq as "the mother of all surprises," noting that "Iraqis are more optimistic about the future than most Americans are."

That is because Americans have been reading the doom and gloom stories in the MSM, including Newsweek, while Iraqis don't get Newsweek or the New York Times (except of course for the terrorists that get the NYT for the secrets it prints)

The reason, of course, is that Iraqis know what is going on in their country while Americans are fed a diet of exclusively negative reporting from Iraq.

The growing dynamism of the Iraqi economy is reflected in the steady increase in the value of the national currency, the dinar, against the three currencies in direct competition with it in the Iraqi marketplace: the Iranian rial, the Kuwaiti dinar and the U.S. dollar, since January 2006.