The world financial community - used to reintegrating former outcasts like Afghanistan and Yugoslavia - will face a tougher challenge if called on to rebuild Iraq.
Success for US President George W. Bush in his aim for "regime change" to topple Iraq leader via threatened military action would make an end to a 12-year UN embargo likely.
Then the international community would have to assess the now-unknown costs of rebuilding Iraq and attempt to resolve what to do about billions of dollars in past debt and war reparation claims.
"If you have a situation where any US action manages to avoid the kind of destruction you saw in 1991, you then still have a massive task," said Iraq expert Raad Alkadiri of Petroleum Finance Co. (PFC) consultancy in Washington.
Even Yugoslavia - the closest recent parallel to Iraq in terms of debt profile and sanctions - would not compare in terms of scale in aid requirements and external obligations.
After the handover of ex-President Slobodan Milosevic to the United Nations war-crimes tribunal in The Hague in 2001, the United States and other donors pledged $1.3 billion to the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, excluding Kosovo.
Government creditors forgave 66 per cent of Yugoslavia's $4.5 billion in debt and gave Belgrade 22 years, including a six-year grace period, to repay the rest.
For Iraq, even the roughest estimates run higher. Figures for what the country will need in assistance range from as low as $1 billion to $7 billion annually for several years to tens of billions for total reconstruction.
The figures for Iraqi debt also range widely - from around $42 billion to over $126 billion - with some obligations stretching back to an eight-year war with neighbouring Iran in the 1980s. The debt figures are disputed by all concerned.
Iraq also has to close a war reparations file stemming from its invasion of Kuwait in August 1990 and a seven-month occupation. The United Nations has approved about $43.6 billion of the $300 billion worth of claims lodged against Iraq so far.
Besides the scale of its bills, the potential of Iraq - sitting on the world's second largest oil reserves - to generate funds also sets it apart from other former targets of US-led coalitions.
"There is certainly this perception that Iraq can pay for itself," PFC's Alkadiri said.
Some analysts have argued that the easiest way to ensure the payment of Iraq's obligations would be the retention of the system now in place under the UN oil-for-food programme that funnels Iraqi oil proceeds to pay for food and medicine and war reparations.
Other analysts say that outcome would be unacceptable to the Iraqi people and would be resisted by any post-Saddam government, which would demand direct control of its revenues.
"It is politically untenable if Iraq has to continue to pay debts that arise from a different political era and on top of that to impose the compensation," said Kamil Mahdi, Exeter University lecturer on the economics of the Middle East.
Sinan al-Shabibi, a consultant for the UN Conference on Trade and Development, said the suspension of payments of obligation and eventually relief were essential for restoring macroeconomic stability and the resumption of growth.
Then payments should be restructured and renegotiated. Al-Shabibi said that Iraq's economy would have no chance of making up the resource deficits and reducing the inflation it suffered over 12 years of UN sanctions if it were not relieved of its external claims. "If that does not happen, it will create a very bad feeling among the Iraqis," Al-Shabibi said.
Toby Dodge, an Iraq expert at the UK's Warwick University, said that Iraq could press its case against paying reparations and debts by pointing to the historical lesson taught by Germany following World War One.
"Germany was saddled with war reparations, its economy collapsed and you saw the rise of Nazism, that's the historical precedence that will be banged over the heads certainly of the Gulf states and the UN compensation committee," Dodge said.
Nonetheless, Dodge said some of Iraq's creditors, like Security Council members Russia and France, would expect to be compensated in some fashion for stepping back from their claims.
"There will be a trade-off," Dodge said. Both countries would expect a role in Iraq's oil industry, having both negotiated multi-billion dollar oil development deals to be implemented once sanctions are lifted, he said.
But Iraqis were unlikely to allow their oil resources to become a commodity to be bargained over by the United States and its allies, Exeter's University's Mahdi said.
"Regardless of whether there will be strong military resistance to an American military onslaught, the presence of foreign oil personnel will not be easy or comfortable," Mahdi said.
"War and the suffering will be associated with them as much as with the military," he said.