As Saddam Hussein's bronze statue crashed to the ground in Baghdad in late April, crowds of excited Iraqis and millions of television viewers around the world believed it could be a second chance for the country's impoverished people.
After all, Iraq has oil - oil with a capital 'O' in fact: 110 billion barrels, the world's second largest reserves after Saudi Arabia.
UN sanctions that had stifled the country's economy for 13 years were lifted in May, when the United States and Britain won broad powers to run Iraq and sell its oil until a new government is established. US ambassador to the United Nations John Negroponte declared: "It is time for the Iraqi people to benefit from their natural resources."
In reality, the outlook for Iraq is far from certain. A look at some of the world's key oil-exporting regions shows that, like the golden touch of the ancient Greek King Midas, the oil gift often comes with costs that can outweigh the benefits.
The international image of oil nations is one of stark contrasts. On the one hand suffering and woes: strikes in Venezuela, starvation in Angola, and violent ethnic clashes in Nigeria. On the other, sumptuous royal palaces in Saudi Arabia.
Juan Pablo Perez Alfonso, a former Venezuelan oil minister, was all too aware of the mixed blessing of oil riches, calling oil the "devil's excrement" in one famous book.
"Ten years, 20 years from now you will see," Perez Alfonso said in the 1970s, "Oil will bring us ruin."
Right on schedule, Venezuela's myth of oil prosperity finally burst in the last decade of the 20th century.
In Nigeria, per capita income of $270 a year is lower than when oil was found in the 1950s. Since 1999, Nigeria has been trying to recover up to $3 billion that disappeared during the four-and-a-half year rule of former president Sani Abacha. Bloody clashes erupt frequently near the oilfields in the Niger delta as tribes fight over scarce revenue and jobs.
As demand for oil grows in the West and reserves dwindle in Europe and the United States, energy companies have gone further afield, looking for oil in developing countries and increasingly under thousands of metres of ocean. They are often welcomed warmly as poor countries lack the capital and technology to develop their own resources.
"These countries usually lack the technology, the capital and expertise needed to develop these fields, especially the deep water projects which are very technologically challenging. Apart from the big international oil companies, there is really no one else who can do it," said Andy Latham, energy analyst at consultancy Wood Mackenzie in Edinburgh.
Iraq's oil helped Saddam stay in power for more than two decades and many critics of the war think that controlling Iraq's reserves was a motive for the US-led attack. The top job in Baghdad has the added bonus of control over an estimated $25 billion in annual oil revenues alone, at pre-war production rates.
"All the oil companies are dying to get into Iraq," says Terry Lynn Karl, professor of politics at Stanford University in California. "And every single opposition group in Iraq is dying to get into power so they can get their hands on those resources and decide how to allocate them."
The question now is whether post-Saddam Iraq can escape what Harvard economists Jeffrey Sachs and Andrew Warner call the "curse of easy riches".
Stanford's Karl, author of "Paradox of Plenty: Oil Booms and Petro-States", is not encouraged.
"The warning for the Iraqi people and the United States is this: it is a very dangerous myth that oil will make you rich," she says. "Oil-exporting nations are some of the most conflict-ridden, economically troubled and authoritarian countries in the world, and this is directly related to their central export.
"Because petroleum is so highly capital intensive and so extraordinarily profitable, no other resource tends to concentrate power and money into the hands of the few like oil does."
Countries that have benefited most from oil have been those with established democracies before the windfall arrived.