November 24, 1983

To have any chance of winning its war against Iran, and perhaps even to sustain the current stalemate for the next two or three years, Iraq must find a way to change some simple but potent financial arithmetic. It has to do, of course, with oil. From a peak of 3.5 million barrels a day in 1979, Iraq's petroleum production fell to 972,000 barrels a day last year, the lowest since 1958, and has crept back only to 1 million barrels a day this year, according to oil industry sources. Iran, by contrast, is pumping about 2.4 million barrels a day this month, and it did slightly better in some months earlier this year.

Governor Cuomo has proposed using at least part of an expected $1 billion in surplus funds from the Municipal Assistance Corporation for economic development in New York City. In making the proposal public yesterday, Mr. Cuomo said the money - part of a surplus expected over the next five years - should be used to establish a ''development bank,'' to be run jointly by the state and the city. He said such a bank would be preferable to funneling the surplus into the city budget for general use, which is what the assistance corporation has been doing for several years. A Letter to Koch ''I am convinced that we now have a chance to use these resources more creatively and more effectively on behalf of the people of the city,'' Mr. Cuomo wrote Mayor Koch on Tuesday in a letter that was released by the Governor's office late yesterday afternoon.

In the wired nation of the future, cable television was to be the video equivalent of the corner newsstand. Just as readers can select from an array of specialized publications ranging from daily newspapers to magazines as diverse as Field & Stream and Connoisseur, the dream for cable television envisioned scores of channels, each catering to a different special interest, that viewers could watch. But a fundamental shift is taking place in the cable industry. The notion of numerous specialized channels is giving way to a system in which a limited number of channels are aimed at mass audiences. ''We're not going to see a cornucopia of services,'' said John Reidy, a cable analyst for Drexel Burnham Lambert, a Wall Street investment firm. ''The basket is starting to look pretty slim.''

''I think they'll come back because they must be aware as much as we are that there cannot and must not be a nuclear confrontation in the world by the only two nations that truly have the great destructive nuclear capability.

The Federal Communications Commission yesterday imposed standard national rental rates for millions of Bell System telephones and ruled that after a two-year transitional period starting Jan. 1, phone rentals and sales would no longer be subject to any regulations. The commission's decision, which affects about 120 million telephones now rented by consumers and businesses, clears up one of the last major uncertainties facing users in connection with the coming breakup of the American Telephone and Telegraph Company. When the Bell System is broken up Jan. 1, splitting the local phone companies from A.T.& T., ownership of the phones will shift from the local companies to A.T.& T. under the approved divestiture plan. Only yesterday, however, did the commission determine what the phone rentals would be and rule that they will no longer be subject to state regulation. The new charges are national in scope, replacing current rental fees that vary from state to state.