This has been the wrong time. For the past 18 months and next 18 months (or more) the PV industry is capacity limited due to reaching the capacity limit for silicon production. It used to be that it could live off the excess capacity from semiconductor manufacturing. Semiconductor growth was enough to keep up with PV needs. Now PV needs its own dedicated silicon production, which is under construction, and factories take years to build.

PV has also been growing just fine. It's been a 20-30% CAGR for 20 years now. That may be small compared to semiconductors, but by industrial standards it is a superb growth rate. The demand has exceeded supply for over a year and prices have been increasing significantly. PV production is backlogged with orders out two years on some lines. Increasing demand is not useful for a while. I'm aware of the thick film technologies, but those are still very limited production and not suitable for many PV purposes. They also face the factory capacity and construction time limits at the moment.

When more factories are on line and production is catching up with orders, then it may be time to consider subsidies.

The most effective subsidies have been those using the European approach. There is no subsidy for construction at all. (Bechtel would not get a penny.) There is a subsidy for power generated. This eliminates the massive fraud and corruption that has been found in the construction subsidies. If you subsidize construction, you get corruption, hugely excessive construction costs, bad siting, inadequate maintenance, and abandoned operations. (See the US history with solar hot water subsidies for a domestic example.) If you subsidize based on actual power generated, it is much harder to have significant loss to corruption. The builder is motivated to build reliably and cost effectively, because they only get their profits from long term power generation.

The steady success for wind generation in the US and Europe is a result of subsidizing generation and not construction.

As for Iraq, there are many more complex factors at work. For example, a few bullets can easily destroy a PV panel. PV panels are no more likely to survive in Iraq than grid power. The bulk of Iraqi power in the post war years was from the myriad individual home generators. These just need gasoline/diesel. Now that the entire economy is in ruins it is also hard to get fuel. I doubt that the PV systems would have survived as long.