“I always say we have a jewel in our hand,” he said, “but we don’t know how to market it.”

Two weeks before I met Shamara, he was in Japan doing just that, as a consultant for the Japanese Embassy in Baghdad. When I telephoned him a week later, he explained in a hush that he was in Istanbul attending a conference on Iraq’s plans to vastly expand its power stations by offering contracts and operating profits to private investors like Shamara Holding. Those contracts, given the sorry state of the country’s electricity, could eventually be worth billions of dollars.

From 2006 until January of this year, the American effort to rebuild Iraq’s economy was largely run not by the embassy but by the Pentagon. During the worst years of sectarian violence, the Pentagon created the Task Force for Business and Stability Operations, led by an intense, taciturn engineer and deputy under secretary of defense, Paul A. Brinkley. It became known as the Brinkley Group, and as with much of the Pentagon’s conduct in the war, its work proved controversial. While it lured investors from all over the world, housing them in a motel-like villa in the Green Zone, its ultimate value is disputed even now. Brinkley himself was investigated for mismanagement and personal misconduct but was never charged with anything. (I have met him twice in Baghdad since 2009, but he did not respond to requests to be interviewed for this article.)

The task force has now shifted its efforts to Afghanistan, a country with far less economic potential than Iraq. Its last project in Iraq was to organize a trip to Baghdad in January for a nonprofit group called the Business Executives for National Security and a handful of prospective investors, including Georgette Mosbacher of the cosmetic maker Borghese; Anthony Scaramucci of SkyBridge Capital; and Rick Goings, the chairman of Tupperware. Their goal was not to seek out investment opportunities so much as to promote entrepreneurialism among the Iraqis themselves. At a meeting with students at Baghdad University, it became clear that much was lost in translation. Mosbacher, also an author and an ardent Republican fund-raiser, shared her up-by-the-bootstraps biography — small-town girl from Indiana achieves the American dream — and offered “practical advice” for anyone in the auditorium who wanted to begin a business. Some of the biggest companies in America, she said, “were started in garages.” “Look around,” she told the students, most of them young women. “Ask what’s not being done. Is it difficult to get shirts cleaned?” (Dry cleaning in Baghdad was, in fact, crippled by international sanctions that banned imports of chemicals. A colleague once told me his suit was cleaned with gasoline.)

The students — some in head scarves, some not — applauded politely, but then a third-year student in physics, Fatin Khalid, stood up and asked when these companies would be coming to Iraq to open businesses that they might work for. Rick Goings offered what he said was “the bitter truth.” “I think it is unlikely that most global corporations — European and American — are going to set up significant companies here because of security,” he told the students. Earlier he said the same thing to the dean. “They have China, India, Indonesia, where there is not a likelihood of getting killed.”

I met Mosbacher again two days later as the delegation prepared to leave. It was her first visit to Iraq, and her main impression was that it was less dangerous than she expected. When I asked her about investing in Iraq, though, she demurred. “Look,” she told me, “I’m going to do business anywhere where I can get quality products.” Iraq’s problem, she said, was that there was “no real concept of a market economy.” She had doubts about the infrastructure needed to warehouse and ship products, about access to capital and, above all, about corruption. “There’s a sense that everyone has their hand out,” she said. “That’s a real problem for U.S. investors.”

In the spring of 2008, as the Bush administration was eagerly defending the troop surge, the Brinkley Group appeared to have landed its most prominent American investment. Marriott International was negotiating to operate a business-class hotel in the Green Zone. Baghdad, a city with an estimated eight million people, had a dearth of hotels even before the American invasion. Even the most famous hotels — the Rashid, with its floor-tile mosaic mocking George H. W. Bush; the Ishtar Sheraton; and the Palestine, where most foreign journalists stayed — were dingy, fraying relics. After the invasion, they also became frequent targets of mortars, rockets and car bombs. Marriott’s interest was a desperately wanted sign of economic revitalization, but like many large projects in Baghdad, it was hyped with fanfare that proved to be unrealistic. In late 2008, a car bomb badly damaged the Marriott in Pakistan’s capital, Islamabad, underscoring the risks inherent in establishing an American brand in places roiled by anti-American extremism. The deal in Baghdad quietly failed to materialize.

The hotel has, however.

“It doesn’t need a feasibility study,” Hayder al-Judi, an engineer by training, told me at a bustling construction site in the center of the Green Zone. Judi returned from exile in New Zealand after the war and is now building an 11-story, 300-room hotel and conference center that will be the first significant addition to the Baghdad skyline since Hussein’s overthrow. As did Akabi and the others, he told me that the business opportunities in today’s Iraq were self-evident. The oil and gas investments will bring a new wave of businessmen and executives, all of whom need a place to stay in a country with very few hotels of the standard they are used to. “We need 20 of these as a start,” he said.