(FORTUNE Magazine) – It may be unseemly to mention it at a time when soldiers and civilians are dying in Iraq. But in the weeks and months that led up to the conflict, property prices soared in the historic Iraqi cities of Najaf and Karbala, south of Baghdad. If you recognize those names, it's because they are places where intense fighting took place over the war's first ten days. The people who were buying property there, mainly Shiite Iraqis as well as some wealthy Iranians, read the newspapers. So why in the world were they buying property in Iraq on the cusp of war?

The answer is that they believe Saddam Hussein is going to be gone soon. They believe, further, that the U.S. is not going to bug out the day Saddam's regime is history, leaving a torn-up Iraq resembling Lebanon in the 1980s, only bigger. Najaf and Karbala are legendary Shiite cities--the former is the home of the tomb of Ali, Mohammed's son in law--and will draw tourists from all over the Muslim world. Once Saddam is gone, that is. Once Iraq is again a place people visit with a sense of security. If all that happens, those investors are likely to get very rich. Timing, as they say, is everything.

Hard to imagine now, isn't it? Amid the death and the smoke that billows nightly over Baghdad, and the antiwar clamor the world over? It turns out that the war wasn't over in four days. It may not be over in four weeks. According to an anonymous general quoted in the Washington Post, it may even take "months." Irrational gloom and doom, naturally enough, followed the irrational exuberance at the start of the war.

With the nation's chattering classes having had what one defense department official privately called "their collective nervous breakdown," let's try a dose of reality. Forces loyal to Saddam are fighting back, in part because in a post-Saddam world (if they survive that long) they are likely to be strung from lampposts. U.S. and British forces are fighting a two-front war--before, as this is written, what may be a decisive battle for Baghdad. As of presstime they have lost 16 men to the enemy. Sixteen, to be sure, is much worse than none. But in the world inhabited by military planners, that's a very low number after a week's worth of ground fighting. It's close to miraculously low, given how the enemy has fought and how much ground the coalition has covered.

But as George W. Bush is learning, what military planners believe is only half of what matters. For all the bravado of Bush and his stalwart ally Tony Blair's saying the war will take as long as it takes, timing is everything for them too. And they are presiding over the first warp-speed war in history. It's one in which real-time images come home from the "embedded" journalists covering it, and the New York Times, with a straight face, editorializes three days after the war has begun that things aren't going fast enough.

No war, of course, can go fast enough. But with the diplomatic costs increasing--in particular with the Arab world's anger rising daily--the administration, its protestations to the contrary, knows it doesn't have much time. At some point the lines will cross on the basic question driving this war in Bush's mind: Is the U.S. safer for having fought it--or not?

It's too soon (that timing thing again) to tell. But critical to the answer, the administration believes, is what Iraq and its neighborhood will look like when this is over. It's hard, admittedly, to picture that now. But focus for a moment on the simple economic facts of life for Iraq and its neighbors once the shooting stops. Iraqi oilfields, having been secured with minimal damage, will quickly draw desperately needed investment as they are upgraded and expanded. As the most important sector in Iraq, oil will get the lion's share of private capital once war is over.

But not all of it. Iraq, pre-Saddam, differed from the lazy oil satrapies in the Gulf, and even Iran. Its economy was more diverse. It should be so after the war too. Agribusiness, wildly inefficient under Saddam's regime, has enormous potential, says Farid Abolfathi, an economist at the economic-consulting firm Global Insight. Infrastructure investment needs, obviously, will also be enormous in war's wake. And as the audacious real estate investors in Najaf and Karbala show, money may well flow into travel, tourism, real estate, and other service sectors. Two to three years out, Abolfathi argues, Iraq will be growing at 10% a year, and could well set off a mini--trade and investment boom in a region that's now home to almost daily pro-Saddam antiwar demonstrations.

For all that to happen, Abolfathi says, the war will have to end in roughly two months--two months to depose a fascist government fighting for its life in a country the size of California. War at warp speed indeed. Global Insight, for what it's worth, is telling its clients to expect just such an optimistic outcome. Pray that it's right.