While most Americans are still glued to TV, radio and the Web, trolling for news of advancing troops and potentially phony Saddam Hussein appearances, some of our fellow citizens are quietly preparing for the blossoming of something even more glorious than a Saddam-free Iraq: a brand new market. Iraq has oil wealth, and as it blinks its eyes and steps out of the dark cave of a decade-plus of United Nations sanctions, there's a long shopping list to spend it on. Kenneth Pollack, in his influential book "The Threatening Storm," writes that rebuilding Iraq will probably require:

"[M]odernizing agriculture, reviving and reforming education, restoring health care (including rebuilding hospitals and modernizing equipment and practices), repairing infrastructure, building and repairing housing, restoring sanitation and sewage services, restructuring and reforming the police force, establishing the rule of law, training lawyers and judges, building political parties, promoting transparency and accountability in governance, restoring and modernizing the energy sector, promoting the adoption of international standards of accounting, enveloping a regulatory banking system, privatizing industry, creating capital markets for investment, providing loans for the start-up of new companies, and building an independent media and political institutions."

Nowhere on that list will you find the importation of smooth-talking consultants specializing in advising industries that, in the United States, are currently facing plummeting stock prices, stagnant markets and indictments of their top executives on charges of fraud. But, heck, they probably need that, too.

At least, that's the thinking behind "The New Iraq," a book about the future of Iraq and what someone hoping to profit from it ought to know. Its author, Joseph Braude, works for Pyramid Research, an outfit providing "international market analysis and consulting services to the global communications industry." He has recently appeared on the "Today" show and been quoted in major newspapers, touting his insights into Iraq's future. He represents that breed of civilian who arrives in a newly occupied nation in the wake of the military personnel, aid workers and intelligence operatives, sniffing around after the money to be made amid all the flux and ferment. But Braude is more than just your average carpetbagger. His is an extraordinary racket: He aims to get rich and famous by hustling the hustlers.

Braude knows the rhetorical advantage of leading with the unexpected and then moving on so briskly that his audience never gets the chance to recover its balance. Although "The New Iraq" must have gone to press in February, he starts with the assumption that a U.S.-led invasion will 1) happen and 2) succeed, breezing by the possibility, taken quite seriously by Pollack and many others, that the nation might be ravaged by violence among rival factions and warlords after the dictator is gone. He jumps past the prevailing tone of the conversation about Iraq -- the grave focus on international law, civilian casualties and the political repercussions of U.S. intervention in an Arab nation -- and skips right to the cool pragmatism and cheerfully bland positive thinking of the trend analyst. It's a move concocted out of pure chutzpah, designed to make him look like a daring, original mind.

Remember those pundits of the new economy, the ones who specialized in making sweeping announcements that business had been entirely revolutionized by technology, that no previous rules applied anymore, that the only way to thrive was to hire such daring young thinkers as themselves at exorbitant hourly rates to teach you to "think outside the box"? Well, Braude is a latter-day version of the same. Those high-tech gurus didn't know much more than anybody else about what the future held, but they understood that when people feel confused, they're likely to swallow anything you dish out, if you dish it with enough panache and self-confidence. It's a skill that's essential to the business consultant's stock in trade -- advising people on how to do something you've never done yourself.

Business consultants come in a few varieties. Some are hired to subject a company's employees to inane, daylong workshops and provide bosses with someone on whom to blame the decision to lay off 20 percent of the staff. Braude doesn't appear to be one of these, though he does write with a certain grim relish about Iraqi workplaces that "deserve the sort of grueling audit that outside consultants are sometimes called upon to carry out on bloated corporations," and where, after the regime change, "enough coffee-slurping party hacks will get the boot for slacking off to usher in new blood in short order."

Instead, Braude is the sort of consultant who makes pronouncements about "sectors" and "overhaul strategies." (Pyramid issues a lot of reports about the state of the cellular-telephone business in various "emerging markets.") He traffics in the business writer's old standby, the sanitized parable meant to illustrate eternal truths about business, except that his have a regional twist. There's the tale of the "postmaster" of the Abbasid Empire, for example, and how the network of roads he traveled might have looked, from space, "like a diagram of the World Wide Web, with nodes and ports linking distant places." You see, even the caliphs of the 8th century faced "the challenges of effective information flow."

"The New Iraq" is a peculiar book, full of many legitimate, if fairly obvious observations -- for example, that "it does not matter how few or many Shi'is ... hold ministry positions [in the new Iraq] if the majority of Shi'is remain an impoverished, undereducated underclass" -- and barely relevant digressions -- a look at the Egyptian and Iranian film industries, and a chapter on Arabic pop music. Those digressions are transparent efforts to demonstrate Braude's youthful hipness, a key asset for a 28-year-old who is selling marketing advice to aging executives worried about losing touch with "key demographics."

What one lacks in experience one can make up in style, and so "The New Iraq" is written in prose coated with surface flash and bravado: belabored metaphors, cute section titles ("Iraq 'n' Roll"), and faux-bold pronouncements, such as "I am not so worried about how to stem American cultural imperialism in Iraq. Instead, I am trying to figure out how to foment Iraqi cultural imperialism in the Middle East and beyond. Anyone want some popcorn?" But underneath it all is the same weirdly spongy writing that business people are so prone to, the forceful vagueness, eager to inspire but terrified of offending, that always winds up communicating next to nothing.

There's also a moral haziness to Braude's assessment of the Iraqi situation, in which dismay over the lamentable state of the nation's justice system gets addressed with about the same concern as the discovery that, during the 1990s, "national branding campaigns were few and far between." (Certainly Iraq can have produced no ads as sophisticated as "The New Iraq.")

Describing his interview with "Dhiya," a resident in an Iraqi refugee camp in Saudi Arabia, Braude praises the man's "remarkable talent and experience at manipulating information informally" before acknowledging that in Iraq the guy was a government informant and, in the camp, he's still informing on his neighbors, though now to the Saudis. In order to improve conditions in the camp, Dhiya tells Braude, he had to "support the Saudi's quest for recalcitrants to lock up and question." Braude refers to this as one of the "moral sacrifices" Dhiya has had to make, as if Dhiya were the one to suffer most from his betrayals. But, Braude assures us, if Dhiya lived in "a functioning state" his "skills" could be "channeled to ruthless competition and revenue growth." Wouldn't that put your mind at ease?

Perhaps the dodgiest aspect of "The New Iraq" is what it doesn't say. A selling point of the book is that Braude has some special expertise, not just because he's worked in the Middle East, but because he is an Iraqi-American, born in the U.S. to the daughter of a venerable Baghdad family. In a fawning profile that ran in the Boston Globe, Braude is quoted likening himself to slain Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl, as someone who feels a "'moral imperative' to fill the 'dangerous chasm of understanding' between Americans and Middle Eastern peoples ... 'I was in a position to gather information from inside Iraq in a way that others couldn't ... Nervousness, apprehension, fear -- all these things I've lumped into one category as useless.'"

How brave. And yet, about midway through "The New Iraq," the careful reader will notice that all of Braude's interviews and encounters with Iraqis take place outside Iraq itself, mostly in Jordan. The de rigueur scene-setting passages tend to be as shiftily worded as this one: "If you stand on the A'imma Bridge over the Tigris River, facing south on a Friday afternoon, Baghdad sprawls out before you." I'm sure if I stood there, it would. But I haven't. Has Braude?

A phone call to Braude's publisher reveals that the author never set foot in Iraq while researching this book, and the Globe profile says he has never lived there. (He does appear to have visited the country as a child.) His publisher explains that as an Iraqi-American Jew, Braude couldn't get a visa to enter the country, despite many efforts. Braude can't be blamed for the Iraqi government's policies, but he is responsible for how he represents himself and he should have been upfront about this. Instead, as in his dedication of the book to "Daniel Pearl, of beloved memory" -- a man who, it turns out, Braude never knew -- he fosters false impressions by artful omission.

The U.S. has made the decision to invade Iraq and eject its current government. (By the way, in another example of evasion posing as imaginative daring, Braude refuses to take a position on the action, dismissing those who do as paying "lip service" to an excessively "polarizing" discussion.) We're now obligated, by our own moral posturing and self-interest, to help that country pull itself out of the hole. Perhaps we do, as President Bush seems to believe, have many fine things to bring to the effort. But if a glib and opportunistic slickster like Braude is any indication of who's about to descend on Iraq, we'll just be adding insult to injury.