Las Vegas in the Arabian Desert

Osama's Nightmare -- Dubai has sold its soul to globalization like few cities have. A glittering capitalist fantasyland has taken shape at the heart of the Arab world. It's a center of international trade, a holiday paradise and a carnival rolled into one.

By Ullrich Fichtner in Dubai, SPIEGEL ONLINE - September 14, 2006, 03:54 PM

High above the Persian Gulf, in Vu's Bar on the fifty-first floor of Dubai's Emirate Towers Hotel, a woman calling herself Nikita drinks pink mai tai cocktails like tap water. She smokes pearl-white Cartier cigarettes. She's moody and irritable -- a thin whore from Kazakhstan at the heart of the strict Islamic world. "Get lost if you don't want me," she says. "You're bad for business, here in my little rat's cage."

Men linger around the tables, locals and vacationers from Kuwait and Saudi Arabia. They're wearing snow-white dishdasha robes and their heads are framed in the traditional kaffiyeh head garb. These are the men who play the moral authority in their families, and then to go out late at night and drink Johnnie Walker Gold Label. They're guzzling sin down greedily, Cuban cigars in hand. Desire for a woman like Nikita flickers in their eyes.

Her body is available for $300. "Three zero zero," she says, drunk. "I'm sad, I'm funny, buy me another mai tai." Behind her slim silhouette and far down below lies the city, shrouded in its nightly mugginess. You can see the row of skyscrapers on Sheikh Zayed Road. Further back and closer to the sea lies the Jumeirah neighborhood's broad strip of villas, a blinking chessboard.
Seen from this hotel bar 300 meters (984 feet) above the ground, it's a quiet and festive panorama, an image fit for travel magazines. But this is only a small part of the city. Like so many images of Dubai, it's illusory. Those images make everything look like something from a glossy brochure, but the city isn't so much a grand festival as a place undergoing profound transformation, a place torn with contradictions. Dubai is like a bag full of puzzle pieces, and no one knows what picture they will make once fit together.

It's Sunday, the work week in the Islamic world is beginning. The temperature is crawling to almost 50 degrees Centigrade (122 Fahrenheit), a mist of evaporated seawater is forming along the coast. Olaf Fey, a paunchy Bavarian with a moustache, brings his cherry-red Mercedes with cream-colored leather seats to a halt. He's willing to give a tour of his own Dubai -- for a fee. Fey worked as a policeman in Munich for 20 years. At the end of his career, he led a canine unit.

When the dog died and his relationship shortly thereafter, he decided it was time to start a new life -- far away from the long German winters and the gloomy mood that comes with them.

He resigned from his position, giving up the benefits of being a civil servant, including his pension. That was four or five years ago. At the time, everyone said he was crazy, but now he's 43 and proud to have re-invented himself here in the desert. Fey sells vacation trips and information, calling himself the managing director of Travel Service Dubai, a kind of one-man business consisting of roughly a dozen Web links that provide 1,000 pages of information on Dubai and always feature a path leading directly to Fey's booking service.

He found out quickly that "there's something going on in Dubai." He says he was "originally" a specialist on Kenya, but Dubai turned out to be the better place. "It's sunny 365 days a year. You don't need a visa, you don't need vaccinations. You have top-quality hotels, top-quality flights. You can go shopping. Everything is safe and clean. There you have it," he says. His mobile phone is always ringing. He grumbles something into it, in English or German. Sometimes he just wordlessly passes the phone to his assistant, Lilly, who sits in the back seat. She's a young Chinese woman who follows him everywhere like a shadow and hardly says a word.
Fey knows Dubai well, especially those parts of the city that tourists like to visit. He has connections to hotel and restaurant managers all over the emirate. Take a tour with him and you'll meet Dutchmen, Pakistanis, Germans, Saudi Arabians. They wave as soon as they see Fey coming. He's set up a little network of business friends out here in the desert. "So, what do we want to do?" he asks over lunch at the bistro of the Royal Meridian hotel. "The usual? Everything's great in Dubai? Just wonderful? Or do we want to tell people how things really are around here?"

Rising and falling buildings

Not even Fey knows exactly "how things really are." He mentions the rent increases, as much as 40 percent a year, and the rapidly rising cost of living, the price of water and electricity, the trouble with new buildings that collapse. This view of Dubai reflects the everyday experience of a mixed-up international middle class. Life is hard for the members of this middle class, in Fey's opinion: It's a demanding life, not the tax-free, sunny dream that people all over the world associate with Dubai -- which is turns out to be many cities.
The glittering fantasy land from the travel brochures is only one of those cities, a beautiful optical illusion arranged by the the world's public relations managers. Whoever believes in it must think of Dubai as a kind of fairy tale, a place of Arab magic, an oasis of camels and sheiks and a cluster of luxury hotels where no day goes by without a golf tournament or swanky horse races.
But Dubai these days is mostly a noisy, rough, unkempt city -- one of the world's largest construction sites. Construction work is going on throughout most of the urbanized coastal strip, and the jackhammers can still be heard from the terraces of seaside hotels at night.
In five or six years, the around-the-clock construction work will produce a patchwork metropolis, a place with many town centers, divided up into theme parks for living, working, shopping, going out -- a post-urban city the likes of which has never existed before. And it will be an architectural mess: an aesthetic blend of Shanghai, Las Vegas, Disney World and southern Tenerife.

The Burj al-Arab hotel in Dubai is located on an artificial island. It's the tallest hotel in the world.Outside the dark windows of Olaf Fey's Mercedes coupe, Dubai moves by like an endless construction site. Far outside of town, in Jebel Ali, the ground is being levelled for the construction of the new giant airport. Closer to the city, you can spot the contours of what will be Dubai Marina. Now it's a forest of uncompleted building structures. In three years it will be a city in its own right, with 124 apartment towers and space for 150,000 people.

Closer to the city center, one construction site follows another. Our trip takes us past gigantic offshore construction projects with names like "The Palm" and "The World," artificial islands for Europeans who have grown weary of civilization. It continues through new business districts like "Knowledge Village" and "Media City." Then, near the city center, there's a cluster of skyscrapers being built with names like "Business Bay," "Old Town," "Dubai Living" and "Festival City." In the middle of a gray sand field riddled with cranes stands the foundation of what will soon be the highest building in the world, Burj Dubai. In two or three years it will stand 180 to 200 stories high, up to 800 meters (or 2,625 feet) -- more than twice the height of the Empire State Building.

The metropolis of superlatives

World records are a major consideration in Dubai's urban planning schemes. When Olaf Fey drives through the city, he points left and right, stringing together superlatives: the tallest building, the biggest shopping mall, the largest airport, and the biggest entertainment park, complete with the highest Eiffel Tower in the world, slightly higher than the original in Paris.
What about the large port in Jebel Ali? "Oh," Fey says. He doesn't have any contacts there. "That's not really very interesting." But Fey's answer is a long way from the truth.

Jabal Ali is the largest seaport ever built. The cranes, the ships, the wharfs -- everything is enormous. Take a tour through it and you'll feel like you're seeing the backdrop to an overblown sci-fi flick. The view from one of the giant cargo cranes is also striking: Millions of cargo containers form straight rows as far as the eye can see. There are ten or twelve such rows, each as broad as a highway. They seem endless, and they're as colorful as the world economy itself.
This panoramic view of the port facility is as overwhelming as London must have been in the 18th century, or Paris 150 years ago. It's a view that says: History is being written here; this is where old certainties break down. Dubai's port shatters the belief that America, Europe or China are the most modern of today's societies. It foreshadows an entirely different 21st century -- and an Arab world altogether different from the one the West thinks it knows.
The port recounts the magical tale of Dubai's rise to glory: Twenty years ago, four companies operated a few cargo cranes in this free trade zone. Today 6,300 companies from 100 countries have a presence here, and they are joined by new companies every day. A nodal point of world trade has taken shape in an extremely short time, linking India and Africa, China and Europe. It's as if the world had always been waiting for this transfer point.

That the port was built in the first place is owed to the boldness of Dubai's ruling Maktum family. When construction began in the 1970s, they had two things: money from oil sales and their old tradition as tradesmen -- not much more. What they added was the audacious plan to transform a barren stretch of desert into a buzzing free-trade zone and a tourist playground.
Ever since then, they've been handling capitalism like a construction kit. They built the new country by assembling pre-fabricated elements: ports, airports, airlines, streets, hotels, shopping malls. The most famous of their mammoth projects has become Dubai's trademark. The Burj al Arab is the tallest hotel in the world, shaped like a sail and positioned on a platform in the sea.

It's a seven-star establishment, and maybe the most famous hotel in the world. Olaf Fey drives up to it in his Mercedes. He knows the people at the gate. The area is surrounded by guards, security mirrors and ditches, as if a World Bank meeting were being held here. Two large white Rolls Royce cars stand parked at the top of the driveway. "So enjoy yourself here, I'll see you later," says Fey as we reach the entrance. He talks like the director of the hotel.

Inside the high lobby, Arab clan leaders walk by, surrounded by a dark orbit of veiled women. Two maids and a butler lead me to my room. One of the maids is from Bavaria. "We Bavarians are everywhere," she says and giggles as if she's made a dirty joke. The Butler is a Filipino wearing a tailcoat. His name is Filibert. Asked if he likes life in Dubai, he replies: "But of course, sir. This way please. You're staying in room 510."

One night here costs €800 ($1,015), and for your money you get 180 square meters (1,938 square feet) of living space and your own private lobby. The ceiling is easily six meters (20 feet) high and features a chandelier large enough to have been taken from a knight's castle. Underneath the chandelier, a curved staircase leads up to sumptuous bedrooms with mirrors above the beds and ivory bathrooms with whirlpools.

Guests arrive at the Burj al-Arab hotel in Dubai.There are luxurious sofas everywhere -- some with eight seats, some with 10. They're covered in rows of silk and damask pillows. Entire soccer teams could stay here -- the hotel bar would be big enough for them too. There are kitchens and dining rooms, and the largest of the three TV sets, the one in the living room, has been fixed in a broad gold frame like a Rembrandt painting.

The Burj al-Arab is an endearing attempt to show off the good life, but most of all it's a prime example of the illusory nature of Dubai's fantasy world. The building wasn't erected mainly to create a swanky hotel. What was at stake was a new image of Dubai's entry into the future.
Experts have calculated that even if the hotel is constantly filled to capacity, the investment will take 50 years to pay off. But those calculations belie a lack of imagination. The hotel has already managed to put the country on the map of international tourism and made Dubai a visible competitor in the grand race that is the world economy.
Dubai's economy has been growing for years at 10 percent per annum. It has long since overcome its dependence on oil. In 1985, oil still accounted for almost 50 percent of the country's gross national product; by 2004, the figure had shrunk to barely six percent. The Maktum family expects about 20 million tourists to visit every year. They want to turn the emirate, now inhabited by less than two million people, into a country of 10 million. The family is recruiting potential citizens all over the world. Dubai may be the first city that takes globalization seriously.

The forbidden question

The mercenaries of capitalism have been drawn to Dubai by the fact that personal income and corporate profits aren't taxed. Foreigners make up more than 85 percent of the population. They come from 150 different nationalities. They're businessmen and adventurers, mostly -- alongside tens of thousands of workers raising the towers of the future in the blistering heat, a new, multinational proletariat from Sri Lanka, India, Pakistan, Syria and Iraq. They have to live in huts in segregated neighborhoods outside the city gates, devoid of any sort of rights.
The local family clans reside in palaces whose portals feature life-sized, galloping golden horses. Their underground garages feature one or two Mercedes cars per family member, along with a couple of Porches or VW Touaregs just for fun. This world and the people who live in it are not a caricature. They really exist.

Mohammed and Kassim are sitting at a table on the forty-fourth floor of Grosvenor House, where the fancy bar is buzzing with people talking business lingo and drinking wine for $300 a bottle. The two men, both of them 58 years old, have been friends all their life. They don't want their full names to appear in print. Together, they dispose of more money than many German cities. They've earned it with construction projects, and by investing in the publishing business and in industrial plants. They've been involved in the cattle and milk industries, and in the oil industry.

Villas at the Jumeira Palm Island in Dubai.Mohammed and Kassim have just returned from a journey, a business trip to the United States. They spent time in Boston, Las Vegas, San Francisco and New York, exploring the country, flying first class and staying in first-class hotels. They stopped by their houses in London and Spain on the return trip. They're in a good mood. They're drinking Cabernet Sauvignon from California.
They talk about their childhood. Mohammed is a short man with a stubbly beard and nickel glasses. Kassim is stocky, with a face like Anthony Quinn's. They talk about the time when Dubai was a village without fresh water and about how they had to wash in the sea, about how they played with stones and camels when they were small. Then, the world beyond the desert and the sea was something they knew only from faded pictures.

They talk about how the economic boom really got going 10 years ago and transformed everything else. Yes, they say, it really is incredible. "Nine thousand workers are employed just for building a subway," says Kassim. "It's great," says Mohammed. For a time, he dined with Dubai's rulers every Thursday. He's a powerful and influential man with considerable social status, but he's also a modest, charming person who has no trouble making conversation in English.

In his traditional white robe and headscarf, he seems like a manager from London or Boston who is going to a costume party dressed up as a sheikh. But the impression is deceptive. Even after two bottles of wine, much laughter and much mutual probing of the other person's character, it takes courage to ask the really tough questions.

Is no one worried about tradition here? Or about Islam? Mohammed avoids my gaze. The expression on his face signals that this question is inappropriate. He says: "There may be some skeptics in Saudi Arabia and in Qatar, but the overall development is positive."
And isn't there criticism from within Dubai itself? Isn't there any trouble related to the number of foreigners? Mohammed and Kassim don't look away, but their body language becomes defensive. They glance at the woman who organized the meeting and introduced me -- the foreigner -- as a friend. "We welcome foreigners. They're doing great business. We all profit. Everything is fine."

And what if a few angry young men were to show up, their intentions not quite benevolent? The men look at their glasses and say nothing. They don't like this question at all. It's the forbidden question here in Dubai. It's not appropriate for the visitor, the foreigner, to ask. They don't reply. They look away to the side.

A city of opposites

"Well, if there were a terrorist attack!" Kassim exclaims, after the question is posed again. "What then? Nothing! We're not afraid. Foreign countries are always fearful. If there's terror, then that's that. But this development can't be reversed anymore. This development is a good one." Mohammed says: "Let's go have dinner, it's time." They're going to have fist-sized filet steaks down in the mezzanine, and they'll drink blood-red Brunello wine with their meal. But they won't enjoy it.

Dubai is the most contradictory city in the world. It's a picture show of crazy opposites and at the same time a place that would be outlawed under sharia rule. It's Osama bin Laden's nightmare. Girls veiled from head to toe rummage for Italian underwear in the shopping malls. The supermarkets feature butchers who sell pork, although they're sectioned off like porn shops in a European video store. The holy city of Mecca isn't far away, but you can get liquor and prostitutes everywhere, and Christmas is already celebrated more extravagantly than the end of Ramadan.

The basic political principles are confused, too. When the war against the Taliban started in Afghanistan, Dubai's rulers were allies of the Taliban. But the United Arab Emirates supported the USA in the war against Iraq. You can see US warships in the port, and there are hundreds and hundreds of Western military advisors at the ruling family's court.

If one accepts the commonplaces of the debate on world cultures, Dubai is an impossible city. On the one hand, it's more cosmopolitan than eastern Germany and southern Italy, more tolerant than Poland or Louisiana, and consumers spend more here than in Munich or Madrid. But on the other hand it's a dictatorship, almost a rogue state, a desert regime without a parliament or a political opposition, without trade unions, political parties or associations. All books and newspapers are subject to censorship. Sharia law is observed, including corporal punishment, and all Jews are strictly banned from entering the country.

Dubai is an impossible city. Perhaps that's why it's also a model, a laboratory for the relaxed co-existence of East and West, a place where people from all over the world can meet. It's not a melting pot, but it's a place where different people are somehow able to live side by side, a bit like neighbors in an anonymous skyscraper.

That could work, even in the long run -- maybe. But it's also possible that everything will go wrong. There have already been food riots by construction workers. There have been demonstrations in the center of town. Perhaps the only reason the city has been spared a terrorist attack is that, at the moment, every other digger, every other construction crane and every other caterpillar truck belongs to the Bin Laden Group, the largest construction business in the Arab world. Maybe even al-Qaeda needs Dubai to launder money for future operations -- who knows. It's a guessing game. Dubai is dazzling and confusing.

Before leaving, I take a trip to the suks, the bazaars along the Creek, the body of water that separates the old part of town from the sea. Olaf Fey and Lilly come along. For a few cents you can travel across the water by boat and enjoy the warm breeze. It's only here by the creek that Dubai looks like an old-fashioned city -- crowded, sprawling, with alleys and old buildings, a government palace, ancient fortresses and imposing mosques.
The Indians and Pakistanis live here. This neighborhood teems like Calcutta. It's pleasant to go for a walk here, outside the theme parks and far from the shopping malls where people go skiing on artifical slopes. Life hasn't been neatly ordered here. "Don't stray too far," says Olaf Fey. "It's easy to lose one's way." Which is almost the whole truth about Dubai, in a single sentence.

no smoking in the green zone?

The decision to send the loyal and the willing instead of the best and the brightest is now regarded by many people involved in the 3 1/2 -year effort to stabilize and rebuild Iraq as one of the Bush administration's gravest errors. "

Ties to GOP Trumped Know-How Among Staff Sent to Rebuild Iraq, Early U.S. Missteps in the Green Zone

By Rajiv Chandrasekaran, Washington Post Staff Writer, Sunday, September 17, 2006; A01
Adapted from "Imperial Life in the Emerald City," by Rajiv Chandrasekaran, copyright Knopf 2006

After the fall of Saddam Hussein's government in April 2003, the opportunity to participate in the U.S.-led effort to reconstruct Iraq attracted all manner of Americans -- restless professionals, Arabic-speaking academics, development specialists and war-zone adventurers. But before they could go to Baghdad, they had to get past Jim O'Beirne's office in the Pentagon.
To pass muster with O'Beirne, a political appointee who screens prospective political appointees for Defense Department posts, applicants didn't need to be experts in the Middle East or in post-conflict reconstruction. What seemed most important was loyalty to the Bush administration.
O'Beirne's staff posed blunt questions to some candidates about domestic politics: Did you vote for George W. Bush in 2000? Do you support the way the president is fighting the war on terror? Two people who sought jobs with the U.S. occupation authority said they were even asked their views on Roe v. Wade .
Many of those chosen by O'Beirne's office to work for the Coalition Provisional Authority, which ran Iraq's government from April 2003 to June 2004, lacked vital skills and experience. A 24-year-old who had never worked in finance -- but had applied for a White House job -- was sent to reopen Baghdad's stock exchange. The daughter of a prominent neoconservative commentator and a recent graduate from an evangelical university for home-schooled children were tapped to manage Iraq's $13 billion budget, even though they didn't have a background in accounting.
The decision to send the loyal and the willing instead of the best... and the brightest is now regarded by many people involved in the 3 1/2 -year effort to stabilize and rebuild Iraq as one of the Bush administration's gravest errors. Many of those selected because of their political fidelity spent their time trying to impose a conservative agenda on the postwar occupation, which sidetracked more important reconstruction efforts and squandered goodwill among the Iraqi people, according to many people who participated in the reconstruction effort.
The CPA had the power to enact laws, print currency, collect taxes, deploy police and spend Iraq's oil revenue. It had more than 1,500 employees in Baghdad at its height, working under America's viceroy in Iraq, L. Paul Bremer, but never released a public roster of its entire staff.
Interviews with scores of former CPA personnel over the past two years depict an organization that was dominated -- and ultimately hobbled -- by administration ideologues.
"We didn't tap -- and it should have started from the White House on down -- just didn't tap the right people to do this job," said Frederick Smith, who served as the deputy director of the CPA's Washington office. "It was a tough, tough job. Instead we got people who went out there because of their political leanings."
Endowed with $18 billion in U.S. reconstruction funds and a comparatively quiescent environment in the immediate aftermath of the U.S. invasion, the CPA was the U.S. government's first and best hope to resuscitate Iraq -- to establish order, promote rebuilding and assemble a viable government, all of which, experts believe, would have constricted the insurgency and mitigated the chances of civil war. Many of the basic tasks Americans struggle to accomplish today in Iraq -- training the army, vetting the police, increasing electricity generation -- could have been performed far more effectively in 2003 by the CPA.
But many CPA staff members were more interested in other things: in instituting a flat tax, in selling off government assets, in ending food rations and otherwise fashioning a new nation that looked a lot like the United States. Many of them spent their days cloistered in the Green Zone, a walled-off enclave in central Baghdad with towering palms, posh villas, well-stocked bars and resort-size swimming pools.
By the time Bremer departed in June 2004, Iraq was in a precarious state. The Iraqi army, which had been dissolved and refashioned by the CPA, was one-third the size he had pledged it would be. Seventy percent of police officers had not been screened or trained. Electricity generation was far below what Bremer had promised to achieve. And Iraq's interim government had been selected not by elections but by Americans. Divisive issues were to be resolved later on, increasing the chances that tension over those matters would fuel civil strife.
To recruit the people he wanted, O'Beirne sought résumés from the offices of Republican congressmen, conservative think tanks and GOP activists. He discarded applications from those his staff deemed ideologically suspect, even if the applicants possessed Arabic language skills or postwar rebuilding experience.
Smith said O'Beirne once pointed to a young man's résumé and pronounced him "an ideal candidate." His chief qualification was that he had worked for the Republican Party in Florida during the presidential election recount in 2000.
O'Beirne, a former Army officer who is married to prominent conservative commentator Kate O'Beirne, did not respond to requests for comment.
He and his staff used an obscure provision in federal law to hire many CPA staffers as temporary political appointees, which exempted the interviewers from employment regulations that prohibit questions about personal political beliefs.
There were a few Democrats who wound up getting jobs with the CPA, but almost all of them were active-duty soldiers or State Department Foreign Service officers. Because they were career government employees, not temporary hires, O'Beirne's office could not query them directly about their political leanings.
One former CPA employee who had an office near O'Beirne's wrote an e-mail to a friend describing the recruitment process: "I watched résumés of immensely talented individuals who had sought out CPA to help the country thrown in the trash because their adherence to 'the President's vision for Iraq' (a frequently heard phrase at CPA) was 'uncertain.' I saw senior civil servants from agencies like Treasury, Energy . . . and Commerce denied advisory positions in Baghdad that were instead handed to prominent RNC (Republican National Committee) contributors."
As more and more of O'Beirne's hires arrived in the Green Zone, the CPA's headquarters in Hussein's marble-walled former Republican Palace felt like a campaign war room. Bumper stickers and mouse pads praising President Bush were standard desk decorations. In addition to military uniforms and "Operation Iraqi Freedom" garb, "Bush-Cheney 2004" T-shirts were among the most common pieces of clothing.
"I'm not here for the Iraqis," one staffer noted to a reporter over lunch. "I'm here for George Bush."
When Gordon Robison, who worked in the Strategic Communications office, opened a care package from his mother to find a book by Paul Krugman, a liberal New York Times columnist, people around him stared. "It was like I had just unwrapped a radioactive brick," he recalled.Finance Background Not Required
Twenty-four-year-old Jay Hallen was restless. He had graduated from Yale two years earlier, and he didn't much like his job at a commercial real-estate firm. His passion was the Middle East, and although he had never been there, he was intrigued enough to take Arabic classes and read histories of the region in his spare time.
He had mixed feelings about the war in Iraq, but he viewed the American occupation as a ripe opportunity. In the summer of 2003, he sent an e-mail to Reuben Jeffrey III, whom he had met when applying for a White House job a year earlier. Hallen had a simple query for Jeffrey, who was working as an adviser to Bremer: Might there be any job openings in Baghdad?
"Be careful what you wish for," Jeffrey wrote in response. Then he forwarded Hallen's resume to O'Beirne's office.
Three weeks later, Hallen got a call from the Pentagon. The CPA wanted him in Baghdad. Pronto. Could he be ready in three to four weeks?
The day he arrived in Baghdad, he met with Thomas C. Foley, the CPA official in charge of privatizing state-owned enterprises. (Foley, a major Republican Party donor, went to Harvard Business School with President Bush.) Hallen was shocked to learn that Foley wanted him to take charge of reopening the stock exchange.
"Are you sure?" Hallen said to Foley. "I don't have a finance background."
It's fine, Foley replied. He told Hallen that he was to be the project manager. He would rely on other people to get things done. He would be "the main point of contact."
Before the war, Baghdad's stock exchange looked nothing like its counterparts elsewhere in the world. There were no computers, electronic displays or men in colorful coats scurrying around on the trading floor. Trades were scrawled on pieces of paper and noted on large blackboards. If you wanted to buy or sell, you came to the exchange yourself and shouted your order to one of the traders. There was no air-conditioning. It was loud and boisterous. But it worked. Private firms raised hundreds of thousands of dollars by selling stock, and ordinary people learned about free enterprise.
The exchange was gutted by looters after the war. The first wave of American economic reconstruction specialists from the Treasury Department ignored it. They had bigger issues to worry about: paying salaries, reopening the banks, stabilizing the currency. But the brokers wanted to get back to work and investors wanted their money, so the CPA made the reopening a priority.
Quickly absorbing the CPA's ambition during the optimistic days before the insurgency flared, Hallen decided that he didn't just want to reopen the exchange, he wanted to make it the best, most modern stock market in the Arab world. He wanted to promulgate a new securities law that would make the exchange independent of the Finance Ministry, with its own bylaws and board of directors. He wanted to set up a securities and exchange commission to oversee the market. He wanted brokers to be licensed and listed companies to provide financial disclosures. He wanted to install a computerized trading and settlement system.
Iraqis cringed at Hallen's plan. Their top priority was reopening the exchange, not setting up computers or enacting a new securities law. "People are broke and bewildered," broker Talib Tabatabai told Hallen. "Why do you want to create enemies? Let us open the way we were."
Tabatabai, who held a doctorate in political science from Florida State University, believed Hallen's plan was unrealistic. "It was something so fancy, so great, that it couldn't be accomplished," he said.
But Hallen was convinced that major changes had to be enacted. "Their laws and regulations were completely out of step with the modern world," he said. "There was just no transparency in anything. It was more of a place for Saddam and his friends to buy up private companies that they otherwise didn't have a stake in."
Opening the stock exchange without legal and structural changes, Hallen maintained, "would have been irresponsible and short-sighted."
To help rewrite the securities law, train brokers and purchase the necessary computers, Hallen recruited a team of American volunteers. In the spring of 2004, Bremer approved the new law and simultaneously appointed the nine Iraqis selected by Hallen to become the exchange's board of governors.
The exchange's board selected Tabatabai as its chairman. The new securities law that Hallen had nursed into life gave the board control over the exchange's operations, but it didn't say a thing about the role of the CPA adviser. Hallen assumed that he'd have a part in decision-making until the handover of sovereignty. Tabatabai and the board, however, saw themselves in charge.
Tabatabai and the other governors decided to open the market as soon as possible. They didn't want to wait several more months for the computerized trading system to be up and running. They ordered dozens of dry-erase boards to be installed on the trading floor. They used such boards to keep track of buying and selling prices before the war, and that's how they'd do it again.
The exchange opened two days after Hallen's tour in Iraq ended. Brokers barked orders to floor traders, who used their trusty white boards. Transactions were recorded not with computers but with small chits written in ink. CPA staffers stayed away, afraid that their presence would make the stock market a target for insurgents.
When Tabatabai was asked what would have happened if Hallen hadn't been assigned to reopen the exchange, he smiled. "We would have opened months earlier. He had grand ideas, but those ideas did not materialize," Tabatabai said of Hallen. "Those CPA people reminded me of Lawrence of Arabia."'Loyalist' Replaces Public Health Expert
The hiring of Bremer's most senior advisers was settled upon at the highest levels of the White House and the Pentagon. Some, like Foley, were personally recruited by Bush. Others got their jobs because an influential Republican made a call on behalf of a friend or trusted colleague.
That's what happened with James K. Haveman Jr., who was selected to oversee the rehabilitation of Iraq's health care system.
Haveman, a 60-year-old social worker, was largely unknown among international health experts, but he had connections. He had been the community health director for the former Republican governor of Michigan, John Engler, who recommended him to Paul D. Wolfowitz, the deputy secretary of defense.
Haveman was well-traveled, but most of his overseas trips were in his capacity as a director of International Aid, a faith-based relief organization that provided health care while promoting Christianity in the developing world. Before his stint in government, Haveman ran a large Christian adoption agency in Michigan that urged pregnant women not to have abortions.
Haveman replaced Frederick M. Burkle Jr., a physician with a master's degree in public health and postgraduate degrees from Harvard, Yale, Dartmouth and the University of California at Berkeley. Burkle taught at the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health, where he specialized in disaster-response issues, and he was a deputy assistant administrator at the U.S. Agency for International Development, which sent him to Baghdad immediately after the war.
He had worked in Kosovo and Somalia and in northern Iraq after the 1991 Persian Gulf War. A USAID colleague called him the "single most talented and experienced post-conflict health specialist working for the United States government."
But a week after Baghdad's liberation, Burkle was informed he was being replaced. A senior official at USAID sent Burkle an e-mail saying the White House wanted a "loyalist" in the job. Burkle had a wall of degrees, but he didn't have a picture with the president.
Haveman arrived in Iraq with his own priorities. He liked to talk about the number of hospitals that had reopened since the war and the pay raises that had been given to doctors instead of the still-decrepit conditions inside the hospitals or the fact that many physicians were leaving for safer, better paying jobs outside Iraq. He approached problems the way a health care administrator in America would: He focused on preventive measures to reduce the need for hospital treatment.
He urged the Health Ministry to mount an anti-smoking campaign, and he assigned an American from the CPA team -- who turned out to be a closet smoker himself -- to lead the public education effort. Several members of Haveman's staff noted wryly that Iraqis faced far greater dangers in their daily lives than tobacco. The CPA's limited resources, they argued, would be better used raising awareness about how to prevent childhood diarrhea and other fatal maladies.
Haveman didn't like the idea that medical care in Iraq was free. He figured Iraqis should pay a small fee every time they saw a doctor. He also decided to allocate almost all of the Health Ministry's $793 million share of U.S. reconstruction funds to renovating maternity hospitals and building new community medical clinics. His intention, he said, was "to shift the mind-set of the Iraqis that you don't get health care unless you go to a hospital."
But his decision meant there were no reconstruction funds set aside to rehabilitate the emergency rooms and operating theaters at Iraqi hospitals, even though injuries from insurgent attacks were the country's single largest public health challenge.
Haveman also wanted to apply American medicine to other parts of the Health Ministry. Instead of trying to restructure the dysfunctional state-owned firm that imported and distributed drugs and medical supplies to hospitals, he decided to try to sell it to a private company.
To prepare it for a sale, he wanted to attempt something he had done in Michigan. When he was the state's director of community health, he sought to slash the huge amount of money Michigan spent on prescription drugs for the poor by limiting the medications doctors could prescribe for Medicaid patients. Unless they received an exemption, physicians could only prescribe drugs that were on an approved list, known as a formulary.
Haveman figured the same strategy could bring down the cost of medicine in Iraq. The country had 4,500 items on its drug formulary. Haveman deemed it too large. If private firms were going to bid for the job of supplying drugs to government hospitals, they needed a smaller, more manageable list. A new formulary would also outline new requirements about where approved drugs could be manufactured, forcing Iraq to stop buying medicines from Syria, Iran and Russia, and start buying from the United States.
He asked the people who had drawn up the formulary in Michigan whether they wanted to come to Baghdad. They declined. So he beseeched the Pentagon for help. His request made its way to the Defense Department's Pharmacoeconomic Center in San Antonio.
A few weeks later, three formulary experts were on their way to Iraq.
The group was led by Theodore Briski, a balding, middle-aged pharmacist who held the rank of lieutenant commander in the U.S. Navy. Haveman's order, as Briski remembered it, was: "Build us a formulary in two weeks and then go home." By his second day in Iraq, Briski came to three conclusions. First, the existing formulary "really wasn't that bad." Second, his mission was really about "redesigning the entire Iraqi pharmaceutical procurement and delivery system, and that was a complete change of scope -- on a grand scale." Third, Haveman and his advisers "really didn't know what they were doing."
Haveman "viewed Iraq as Michigan after a huge attack," said George Guszcza, an Army captain who worked on the CPA's health team. "Somehow if you went into the ghettos and projects of Michigan and just extended it out for the entire state -- that's what he was coming to save."
Haveman's critics, including more than a dozen people who worked for him in Baghdad, contend that rewriting the formulary was a distraction. Instead, they said, the CPA should have focused on restructuring, but not privatizing, the drug-delivery system and on ordering more emergency shipments of medicine to address shortages of essential medicines. The first emergency procurement did not occur until early 2004, after the Americans had been in Iraq for more than eight months.
Haveman insisted that revising the formulary was a crucial first step in improving the distribution of medicines. "It was unwieldy to order 4,500 different drugs, and to test and distribute them," he said.
When Haveman left Iraq, Baghdad's hospitals were as decrepit as the day the Americans arrived. At Yarmouk Hospital, the city's largest, rooms lacked the most basic equipment to monitor a patient's blood pressure and heart rate, operating theaters were without modern surgical tools and sterile implements, and the pharmacy's shelves were bare.
Nationwide, the Health Ministry reported that 40 percent of the 900 drugs it deemed essential were out of stock in hospitals. Of the 32 medicines used in public clinics for the management of chronic diseases, 26 were unavailable.
The new health minister, Aladin Alwan, beseeched the United Nations for help, and he asked neighboring nations to share what they could. He sought to increase production at a state-run manufacturing plant in the city of Samarra. And he put the creation of a new formulary on hold. To him, it was a fool's errand.
"We didn't need a new formulary. We needed drugs," he said. "But the Americans did not understand that."A 9/11 Hero's Public Relations Blitz
In May 2003, a team of law enforcement experts from the Justice Department concluded that more than 6,600 foreign advisers were needed to help rehabilitate Iraq's police forces.
The White House dispatched just one: Bernie Kerik.
Bernard Kerik had more star power than Bremer and everyone else in the CPA combined. Soldiers stopped him in the halls of the Republican Palace to ask for his autograph or, if they had a camera, a picture. Reporters were more interested in interviewing him than they were the viceroy.
Kerik had been New York City's police commissioner when terrorists attacked the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001. His courage (he shouted evacuation orders from a block away as the south tower collapsed), his stamina (he worked around the clock and catnapped in his office for weeks), and his charisma (he was a master of the television interview) turned him into a national hero. When White House officials were casting about for a prominent individual to take charge of Iraq's Interior Ministry and assume the challenge of rebuilding the Iraqi police, Kerik's name came up. Bush pronounced it an excellent idea.
Kerik had worked in the Middle East before, as the security director for a government hospital in Saudi Arabia, but he was expelled from the country amid a government investigation into his surveillance of the medical staff. He lacked postwar policing experience, but the White House viewed that as an asset.
Veteran Middle East hands were regarded as insufficiently committed to the goal of democratizing the region. Post-conflict experts, many of whom worked for the State Department, the United Nations or nongovernmental organizations, were deemed too liberal. Men such as Kerik -- committed Republicans with an accomplished career in business or government -- were ideal. They were loyal, and they shared the Bush administration's goal of rebuilding Iraq in an American image. With Kerik, there were bonuses: The media loved him, and the American public trusted him.
Robert Gifford, a State Department expert in international law enforcement, was one of the first CPA staff members to meet Kerik when he arrived in Baghdad. Gifford was the senior adviser to the Interior Ministry, which oversaw the police. Kerik was to take over Gifford's job.
"I understand you are going to be the man, and we are here to support you," Gifford told Kerik.
"I'm here to bring more media attention to the good work on police because the situation is probably not as bad as people think it is," Kerik replied.
As they entered the Interior Ministry office in the palace, Gifford offered to brief Kerik. "It was during that period I realized he wasn't with me," Gifford recalled. "He didn't listen to anything. He hadn't read anything except his e-mails. I don't think he read a single one of our proposals."
Kerik wasn't a details guy. He was content to let Gifford figure out how to train Iraqi officers to work in a democratic society. Kerik would take care of briefing the viceroy and the media. And he'd be going out for a few missions himself.
Kerik's first order of business, less than a week after he arrived, was to give a slew of interviews saying the situation was improving. He told the Associated Press that security in Baghdad "is not as bad as I thought. Are bad things going on? Yes. But is it out of control? No. Is it getting better? Yes." He went on NBC's "Today" show to pronounce the situation "better than I expected." To Time magazine, he said that "people are starting to feel more confident. They're coming back out. Markets and shops that I saw closed one week ago have opened."
When it came to his own safety, Kerik took no chances. He hired a team of South African bodyguards, and he packed a 9mm handgun under his safari vest.
The first months after liberation were a critical period for Iraq's police. Officers needed to be called back to work and screened for Baath Party connections. They'd have to learn about due process, how to interrogate without torture, how to walk the beat. They required new weapons. New chiefs had to be selected. Tens of thousands more officers would have to be hired to put the genie of anarchy back in the bottle.
Kerik held only two staff meetings while in Iraq, one when he arrived and the other when he was being shadowed by a New York Times reporter, according to Gerald Burke, a former Massachusetts State Police commander who participated in the initial Justice Department assessment mission. Despite his White House connections, Kerik did not secure funding for the desperately needed police advisers. With no help on the way, the task of organizing and training Iraqi officers fell to U.S. military police soldiers, many of whom had no experience in civilian law enforcement.
"He was the wrong guy at the wrong time," Burke said later. "Bernie didn't have the skills. What we needed was a chief executive-level person. . . . Bernie came in with a street-cop mentality."
Kerik authorized the formation of a hundred-man Iraqi police paramilitary unit to pursue criminal syndicates that had formed since the war, and he often joined the group on nighttime raids, departing the Green Zone at midnight and returning at dawn, in time to attend Bremer's senior staff meeting, where he would crack a few jokes, describe the night's adventures and read off the latest crime statistics prepared by an aide. The unit did bust a few kidnapping gangs and car-theft rings, generating a stream of positive news stories that Kerik basked in and Bremer applauded. But the all-nighters meant Kerik wasn't around to supervise the Interior Ministry during the day. He was sleeping.
Several members of the CPA's Interior Ministry team wanted to blow the whistle on Kerik, but they concluded any complaints would be brushed off. "Bremer's staff thought he was the silver bullet," a member of the Justice Department assessment mission said. "Nobody wanted to question the [man who was] police chief during 9/11."
Kerik contended that he did his best in what was, ultimately, an untenable situation. He said he wasn't given sufficient funding to hire foreign police advisers or establish large-scale training programs.
Three months after he arrived, Kerik attended a meeting of local police chiefs in Baghdad's Convention Center. When it was his turn to address the group, he stood and bid everyone farewell. Although he had informed Bremer of his decision a few days earlier, Kerik hadn't told most of the people who worked for him. He flew out of Iraq a few hours later.
"I was in my own world," he said later. "I did my own thing."

Bush's Message to Iran

I was able to put that question to Bush in a one-on-one interview in the Oval Office on Wednesday. His answer made clear that the administration wants a diplomatic solution to the confrontation over Iran's nuclear program -- one that is premised on an American recognition of Iran's role as an important nation in the Middle East.

By David Ignatius
The Washington Post, Friday, September 15, 2006; Page A19

What would President Bush say to the Iranian people if he had a chance to communicate directly with them? I was able to put that question to Bush in a one-on-one interview in the Oval Office on Wednesday. His answer made clear that the administration wants a diplomatic solution to the confrontation over Iran's nuclear program -- one that is premised on an American recognition of Iran's role as an important nation in the Middle East.

"I would say to the Iranian people: We respect your history. We respect your culture. We admire the entrepreneurial skills of your people. I would say to the Iranian people that I recognize the importance of your sovereignty -- that you're a proud nation, and you want to have a positive future for your citizens," Bush said, answering quickly and without notes.

"In terms of the nuclear issue," he continued, "I understand that you believe it is in your interest -- your sovereign interest, and your sovereign right -- to have nuclear power. I understand that. But I would also say to the Iranian people, there are deep concerns about the intentions of some in your government who would use knowledge gained from a civilian nuclear power industry to develop a weapon that can then fulfill the stated objectives of some of the leadership [to attack Israel and threaten the United States]. And I would say to the Iranian people that I would want to work for a solution to meeting your rightful desires to have civilian nuclear power."
"I would tell the Iranian people that we have no desire for conflict," Bush added.
He expressed hope that Iran would help stabilize Iraq, .....but he said the best channel for this dialogue would be through Iraq's new prime minister, Nouri al-Maliki, who has been in Tehran this week. And he called for a new program of cultural and educational exchanges between the United States and Iran as a way of encouraging greater contact and trust.

Bush's comments were a clear public signal of the administration's strategy in the confrontation over Iran's nuclear program. In recent days, the Washington rumor mill has been bubbling with talk that the administration is planning military options for dealing with the crisis, perhaps in the near term. But Bush's remarks went in a different direction. His stress was on reassuring Iran that the United States recognizes its ambitions to be an advanced nation, with a robust civilian nuclear power program and a role in shaping the Middle East commensurate with its size and power. The red lines for America involve nuclear weapons, military threats to Israel or the United States, and Iran's links to terrorist groups.

Bush's comments tracked the offer the United States and its allies have made to Iran if it agrees to suspend its enrichment of uranium. He proposed that the West supply enriched uranium to Iran and other countries, and collect the nuclear waste. He argued that this global program "would be a solution that would answer a deep desire from the Iranian people to have a nuclear power industry."

On Iraq, Bush said Maliki's visit to Tehran was "aimed at convincing the Iranians that a stable Iraq is in their interest. They have said so many times, and I think Prime Minister Maliki is now attempting to find out what that means, and how the Iraqi government can work with the Iranians to create a sense of stability."

Bush said he had read commentary criticizing Maliki's trip. "I disagree. Prime Minister Maliki should go to Iran. It is in Iraq's national interest that relations with Iran be such that there are secure borders and no cross-border issues, including the exportation of equipment that can harm Iraqi citizens as well as coalition troops, and the exportation of extremism that can prevent this young [Iraqi] democracy from flourishing."
Our discussion followed the 12-day visit to the United States by former Iranian president Mohammad Khatami. I asked Bush why he had approved this visit by a high-level Iranian and what he thought it had accomplished.

"One of the dilemmas facing [American] policymakers is to understand the nature, the complex nature of the Iranian regime," he said. "And I thought it would be beneficial for our country to receive the former leader, Khatami, to hear what he had to say. And as importantly for him, to hear what Americans had to say."
He wanted Khatami to understand that on the nuclear issue and Hezbollah's attacks on Israel, "It's not just George W. Bush speaking."

The Khatami visit "said that the United States is willing to listen to voices," Bush explained. "And I hope that sends a message to the Iranian people that we're an open society, and that we respect the people of Iran." Clearly, the White House wants to reach out to segments of Iranian opinion beyond the hard-line president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
I asked Bush what next steps he would favor in opening dialogue with Iran. "I would like to see more cultural exchanges," he said. "I would like to see university exchanges. I would like to see more people-to-people exchanges."

"I know that the more we can show the Iranian people the true intention of the American government," Bush concluded, "the more likely it is that we will be able to reach a diplomatic solution to a difficult problem."
I came away with a sense that Bush is serious about finding a peaceful solution to the nuclear crisis, and that he is looking hard for ways to make connections between America and Iran.

For an ongoing discussion of international issues, David Ignatius is co-hosting, with Newsweek's Fareed Zakaria, a new Web feature called PostGlobal at www.washingtonpost.com. His e-mail address isdavidignatius@washpost.com.

Amedeo Clemente Modigliani (1884 - 1920)

A beautiful Italian Jew addicted to hash, drink and ether, consumptive and dead at 35, Modigliani's scandalous life has long propped up his artistic reputation. Gathered together, his paintings reveal a skilful charmer who squandered his early promise

By Laura Cumming, Sunday July 9, 2006T he Observer , a review of

Modigliani and His Models, Royal Academy, London W1; until 15 October

A beautiful Italian Jew addicted to hash, drink and ether, consumptive and dead at 35, Amedeo Modigliani is surely the early 20th-century's most vivid peintre maudit: a cursed genius fit for Hollywood movies. That his reputation survived the disastrous impersonation by Andy Garcia, glassy-eyed and furiously scowling to express emotion, is due only to the total box-office failure of that film. But there will be others, just as the stream of sensational biographies continues with yet another this week. Modigliani has always been as famous for his life as his art. Consequently, this retrospective, the first here in several decades, will likely be too jammed for anyone to get better acquainted with the paintings.

This might have been a piercing loss, yet it isn't. The revelation of more than 60 Modiglianis in an empty gallery the other day is that they aren't actually susceptible to very much looking. His portraits deflect attention to an amazing degree. His famous women - long, lean and serene - are never more than they seem on the surface. You could have a pleasant enough time at this show and it certainly won't deflate Modigliani's immense popularity.

But if the old question always used to be how such a violent and tormented drunk could have produced such refined compositions, then the new one .......ought to be whether the life is now propping up the aesthetic reputation.

Hence, one suspects, the Royal Academy's wily concentration on Modigliani's lovers. These included poet Anna Akhmatova before she saw reason and wannabe writer Beatrice Hastings, whom he notoriously used to drag by the hair (though she got back at him with broken chairs). There are several entirely opaque portraits of his dealer's wife and many more of his last mistress, Jeanne Hebuterne, evidently a devoted slave, who threw herself from a high window the night after his death. Nine months' pregnant, she killed both herself and their child.

What did Hebuterne look like? Photographs exist and one might anyway deduce auburn hair and brown eyes from Modigliani's paintings. But then she will appear as a blue-eyed brunette; the last thing you expect is an actual likeness. Which raises the central conundrum of these portraits, or as one might say designs. Clearly they are Modiglianis above all else - those tilted, oval heads with their moues, sightless eyes and elongated noses - sheer style over subject. But why are the differences so pointlessly slight?

As Jean Cocteau, one of very few sitters Modigliani ever engaged with, tartly observed, each model looks like the next because they all conform to an inner stereotype. This saved Modigliani the bother of acknowledging, still less analysing, the living being who sat before him, and it's what makes these portraits so reamed-out, repetitious and boring.

Either it was that or being progressively stoned. For Modigliani didn't start out this way. A portrait of Picasso from 1915, done on cardboard for want of cash, captures those sly and knowing eyes so well ('Savoir' reads the inscription, perhaps not altogether respectfully) that one expects all kinds of future insights. But by the end of the show, Modigliani has been going nowhere for years - one seated woman, hands winsomely clasped, after another, with not much more than a hankie or hair colour to distinguish them.

A trio of portraits is instructively grouped together - three friends in exactly the same head and wing-collar format. The differences are tiny and come down to minor adjustments of the formula: circumflex eyebrows instead of smooth arcs, a cursory crescent to indicate a double chin, the eyes cross-hatched, asymmetric or blanked out. This is the art of caricature and, indeed, Modigliani was a sharp satirist (witness his image of the insufferably precise Cocteau, alas not in this exhibition). But hardly has he begun to caricature his sitters, it seems, viz the wonderful portrait of his dealer as a Dashiell Hammett gangster, all razor 'tache and tipped-back hat, than he starts to parody himself.
In a single brilliantly condensed room, you can see where his style comes from: caryatids and Cycladic figures, straight transcriptions of African art, a bit of Picasso, a radically simplified limestone head (the key to everything that follows) inspired by his mentor, Brancusi. It's the classic avant-garde synthesis, practically de rigueur in Paris circa 1914. And Modigliani makes something so beautiful of it to begin with, those long arabesques and rhythmic curves, the gorgeous palette of terracotta, cream and dove grey, the paint laid down like a sweetly seductive paste. It's a kind of Mannerism, conflating hints of Botticelli and Parmigianino, tinged with melancholy.
But did Modigliani take the idea of asymmetric eyes from Picasso's deathless Gertrude Stein with her X-marked stare? Certainly, he envied the Spaniard. His variations, particularly those all-blue orbs, faintly sci-fi, make his sitters unknowable, wistful, remote: distinctively Modigliani. And without this trick, the later portraits are hackneyed and ordinary.

What does him in? A fatal weakness for elongation, for one thing. A wall of six nudes gives the game away, each streamlined torso fashionably longer than the next. In their time, these paintings were a scandal, but they seem so mild and pretty today, with their cute little pubic patches. He can be as kitsch as late Chagall and worse. A Modigliani nude isn't flesh and blood but shape, pattern, streamlined curves and bijou details, all those things that would make Art Deco such a charming style.

How would Modigliani have gone on had he not died so young, not been so obsessed with self-destruction? The last room of this show is a wretched spectacle. There are one or two late revivals, where he tries to communicate some spark or have some kind of response to his sitter.
But the 1919 self-portrait, just a configuration of half-hearted shapes and a hesitant palette, is terribly feeble. This portrait was Modigliani's last and emptiest work. Perhaps if he had started with himself, he would have gone deeper as an artist. But he is to himself a sad blank.W1 (0870 8488484), from Sat until Oct 15.

A Prairie Home Companion

from Lake Wobegon

No this is not a movie post – but rather a post about a movie made by Robert Altman, about Garrison Keillor. I still remember listening to A Prairie Home Companion in 1980’s when Reagan was in office – it was back then -- indeed a ray of hope coming from small town America. Keilor has been deservedly called the head of satirical opposition in America. A tilte he has carried enduringly well.

He is the author of 11 books, including Lake Wobegon Days (1985), The Book of Guys (1993), The Old Man Who Loved Cheese (1996), Wobegon Boy (1997), and Me, By Jimmy (Big Boy) Valente (1999). He is a member of the American Academy of the Arts and Sciences and was recently presented with a National Humanities Medal by the National Endowment for the Humanities.

His radio Show, A Prairie Home Companion, broadcast weekly on NPR from the fictional town of Lake Wobegon has been a staple of the American Left since it went national in 1979, and the subject of Altman’s movie. In the radio show listeners hear items such as:

Original comedy sketches performed by Keillor and cast, and punctuated by sound-effects wizard Tom Keith; Music by guests like guitarist Leo Kottke, singer Greg Brown, jazz pianist-singer Diana Krall, and Delta bluesman John Hammond; Stories from the town "that time forgot and decades cannot improve" in Keillor's signature monologue, "The News from Lake Wobegon."

Each season features special shows, including the annual "Talent from Towns Under 2,000" contest, the annual Joke Show, and continuing sketches like Lives of the Cowboys, Guy Noir -- Radio Private Eye, Bob the Young Artist, and musical spoofs such as "La Influenza," a five-minute opera about the common cold.

It appears that Keilor approached Altman to make the movie, and in it he plays himself as well as claiming the writing credits for the movie. The cast is stellar, and Altman shows once again his knack for developing character through dialogue. IMDB page

Foucault the Neohumanist?

By RICHARD WOLIN, Chronicle of Higher Education, The Chronicle Review

Richard Wolin is a professor of history, comparative literature, and political science at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. His books include The Seduction of Unreason: The Intellectual Romance With Fascism From Nietzsche to Postmodernism (Princeton University Press, 2004) and The Frankfurt School Revisited (Routledge, 2006).

In 1975 and 1976, Michel Foucault published two books that single-handedly reoriented scholarship in the humanities: Discipline and Punish and The History of Sexuality. Thereby, Foucault fundamentally altered the way we think about power ( we must not forget Madness and Civilization, HT).
For centuries, power had been associated with the negative capacity to deny or forbid. In spatial terms, it stood at the apex of a vertical axis. This view suited our modern conception of political sovereignty as a top-down phenomenon. Power reputedly consisted ......of a relationship between sovereign and subjects. It bespoke the capacity of rulers to censure or to control the behavior of those they ruled. That was the traditional model of power that Foucault vigorously challenged in these path-breaking studies. As he remarked laconically: "In political thought and analysis, we still have not cut off the head of the king." By remaining beholden to an anachronistic notion of power, the human sciences, Foucault claimed, remained impervious to the distinctive modalities and flows of power in modern society, tone-deaf to the diffuse and insidious operations of "biopower": modern society's well-nigh totalitarian capacity to institutionally regulate and subjugate individual behavior — via statistics, public-health guidelines, and conformist sexual norms — down to the most elementary, "corpuscular" level.
What would happen if we reconceived power as operating on a horizontal axis, wondered Foucault? What if the traditional vertical focus on sovereignty, governance, and law were diversionary, leading us to mistake power's genuine tenor and scope? What if power's defining trait were its productive rather than its negative or suppressive capacities? In that case, power's uniqueness would lie in its ability to shape, fashion, and mold the parameters of the self, potentially down to the infinitesimal or corpuscular level. Following Descartes, we have typically been taught to conceive of the self as a locus of autonomy or freedom. But what if this autonomy were in fact illusory, concealing potent, underlying, and sophisticated mechanisms of domination?
That is the hypothesis Foucault sets forth during his later, "genealogical" phase. Just as Nietzsche, in Genealogy of Morals, tried to show that the Western ideas of good and evil derive from an ethos of weakness — specifically, from the "slave revolt" in morals against aristocratic society — Foucault, in a similar vein, seeks to demonstrate the compromised origins of the modern "subject." In his view, the illusions of autonomy conceal a deeper bondage. The so-called subject is merely the efflux of what Foucault construes as a totalizing "carceral society." From early childhood, the subject is exposed or "subjected" to what Foucault labels the "means of correct training": an all-pervasive expanse of finely honed behavioral-modification techniques that suffuse the institutional structure of civil society — schools, hospitals, the military, prisons, and so forth.
In this way, Foucault boldly upends the modern narrative of progress. What we have customarily interpreted as evidence of expanding civic freedom — that is, the triumph of rights-based liberalism — when viewed in a Foucauldian optic has in fact produced more effective mechanisms of social control. Foucault audaciously stands the standard, Enlightenment view of the relationship between insight and emancipation on its head. Knowledge, which we traditionally thought would set us free, merely enmeshes us more efficiently in the omnivorous tentacles of "biopower." The popular Foucauldian coinage "power/knowledge" suggests that the modern ideal of value-free knowing is illusory. Instead, knowledge is perennially implicated in the maintenance and reproduction of power relations. The reign of biopower is buttressed and facilitated by the scientific disciplines of criminology, medicine, public administration, and so forth. In Foucault's view, moreover, the Enlightenment-inspired discourse of the human sciences is a prime offender. The so-called sciences of man function as the handmaidens of a nefarious "disciplinary society," furnishing it with data that serve the administrative needs of "governmentality": the Orwellian technique of turning citizens into pliable and cooperative "docile bodies." Little wonder that in The Order of Things — a manifesto of French antihumanism — Foucault unabashedly celebrates the "death of man" and implies that, in the aftermath of his disappearance, the world will be much better off.
Contra Hegel, truth does not yield "absolute knowledge." Instead, as Foucault maintains in a 1977 interview, truth must be reconceptualized "as a system of ordered procedures for the production, regulation, distribution, circulation, and operation of statements." As such, truth is "linked in a circular relation with systems of power, which produce and sustain it, and to effects of power, which it induces and which extends it." In his celebrated essay "Nietzsche, Genealogy, History," Foucault carries this analysis a step further, claiming provocatively that "all knowledge rests upon injustice. ... [The] instinct for knowledge is malicious (something murderous, opposed to the happiness of mankind)."
In The History of Sexuality, Foucault raised the alarm concerning the perils of "normalization." The notion that one should possess a normal sexual identity, he suggested, testifies to the workings of biopower. It is a mechanism of social control that reinforces conformist sexual practices and criminalizes "deviancy." In Foucault's view, the 1960's ethos of sexual liberation, as prophesied by Wilhelm Reich and Norman O. Brown, was merely another manifestation of normalization: Under the guise of sexual emancipation, we were instructed by "experts" to define ourselves in terms of having a positive and determinate sexual identity. Yet, as normative, all such conceptions are by definition limiting, exclusionary, and fundamentally repressive. The only way to counteract the pitfalls of "normalization," Foucault suggests (following the lead of Georges Bataille), is through an ethos of radical "transgression."
Yet, at times, the maw of biopower as described by Foucault seems so inescapable and totalizing that one is at a loss as to how one might combat it. After all, how can we ensure that a given instance of transgression is not merely a ruse on the part of biopower to further ensnare us? At The History of Sexuality's conclusion, all we are left with is a tantalizing yet frustratingly nebulous appeal to a "different economy of bodies and pleasures."
In North America, Foucault's innovative conception of biopower inspired new research models, above all in the areas of feminism, gender studies, and "queer theory." Auspiciously, The History of Sexuality appeared in English in 1978, just as the feminist and gay-rights movements had attained a measure of respectability and political prominence. That was also the moment when first-wave or rights-oriented feminism seemed to have run out of steam. Second-wave feminism, which embraced and affirmed women's "difference," emerged to fill the void. Although liberal political thought excelled at theorizing basic rights — and thus well suited the needs of first-wave, egalitarian feminism — it had little to say about trickier questions of female "self-realization": how women might fulfill themselves as women. Here, conversely, Foucault's bio-power paradigm, with its endemic suspicions of "norms" and "normalization," not to mention its manifest sympathy for "marginal sexualities," excelled, especially where considerations of "difference" were at stake.
In American academe, that's the gist of the Foucault story. He has been venerated and canonized as the messiah of French antihumanism: a harsh critic of the Enlightenment, a dedicated foe of liberalism's covert normalizing tendencies, an intrepid prophet of the "death of man."
But increasingly that perception seems wrong, or, at best, only partially true. Considerable evidence suggests that, later in life, Foucault himself became frustrated with the antihumanist credo. He underwent what one might describe as a learning process. He came to realize that much of what French structuralism had during the 1960s rejected as humanist pap retained considerable ethical and political value.
That re-evaluation of humanism redounds to his credit as a thinker. It stems from a profound and undeniable moral insight: If one wishes to become an effective critic of totalitarianism, as Foucault certainly did, the paradigm of "man" remains an indispensable ally. After all, it is the totalitarians themselves who seek to quash or eliminate man. As antitotalitarian political analysts and actors, our responsibility is to spare him that fate.
It would not be a misnomer to suggest that in fact the later Foucault became a human-rights activist, a political posture that stands in stark contrast with his North American canonization as the progenitor of "identity politics."
The major difference between the two standpoints may be explained as follows: Whereas human rights stress our formal and inviolable prerogatives as people (equality before the law, freedom of speech, habeas corpus, and so forth), identity politics emphasize the particularity of group belonging. The problem is that the two positions often conflict: Assertions of cultural particularism often view an orientation toward rights as an abstract, formalistic hindrance. Thus identity politics risks regressing to an ideology of "groupthink." Or, as a percipient German friend once observed with reference to the American culture wars, "Identity politics: That's what we had in Germany between 1933 and 1945." He correctly insinuated that unless multiculturalist allegiances are mediated by a fundamental respect for the rule of law and basic constitutional freedoms, the door will have been opened to fratricidal conflict.
In Discipline and Punish, Foucault embraced the thesis of "soft totalitarianism" to describe the carceral system of the modern West. To his credit, he would eventually criticize with equal vigor the post-Stalinist variant of totalitarianism predominant in Eastern Europe. (Among left-leaning French intellectuals, a veritable turning point and awakening came with the publication of Solzhenitsyn's magisterial Gulag Archipelago in 1974.) If, during the 1960s, the heroes of the French left had been developing-world revolutionaries such as Che, Fidel, Ho Chi Minh, and Mao, during the late 1970s dissidence was in vogue. Václav Havel, Andrei Sakharov, Lech Walesa, and a cast of less-heralded oppositionists became the new standard-bearers for the figure of the engaged intellectual.
With acumen and enthusiasm, Foucault boarded the antitotalitarian bandwagon. Since his election to the prestigious Collège de France in 1970, he increasingly cultivated the persona of an intellectual activist. During the 1970s, Foucault justly inherited Sartre's mantle as the prototype of the intellectuel engagé. One of his first forays in this regard consisted of a vigorous defense of the so-called New Philosophers — ex-Maoists, such as André Glucksmann, Bernard-Henri Lévy, and Guy Lardreau, who had finally seen the light and reinvented themselves as un-relenting critics of left-wing political despotism. In many respects, the New Philosophers were Foucault's intellectual progeny. Using conceptual tools he had developed such as "power/knowledge" and disciplinary surveillance, they merely extended his critical position to encompass the Soviet-dominated lands of, in Rudolf Bahro's words, "really existing socialism."
In 1977 Foucault took to the pages of the French weekly Le Nouvel Observateur to publish a ringing justification of Glucksmann's antitotalitarian screed, The Master Thinkers, for daring to speak truth to power. Undoubtedly, Foucault saw through much of New Philosophy's rhetorical histrionics and shallow posturing. In his view, what was primarily at stake was a larger political point: delivering a coup de grâce to the French left's naïve infatuation with Marxism. Previously, French intellectuals had developed a network of sophisticated rationalizations to justify left-wing dictatorships. However, in view of the 1968 Soviet invasion of Prague, the unspeakable depredations of Mao's Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, and Pol Pot's gruesome reign of terror in Cambodia, such justifications were wearing increasingly thin. Wasn't a distinctly grisly and horrific political pattern beginning to emerge? In this way, Foucault sought to call the bluff of his fellow leftists. In his review-essay "The Great Rage of Facts," he pointedly mocked the idea, once popular among the left, that the historical necessity of socialism could ever trump basic human or moral concerns.
Far from being a one-time gambit, Foucault's spirited endorsement of the antitotalitarian ethos set the tone for many of his later intellectual and political involvements. In 1978, Bernard Kouchner, the human-rights activist and Doctors Without Borders founder, contacted Foucault to support the plight of the Vietnamese "boat people," who were fleeing persecution by the recently installed Communist government. As a result, the group "A Boat for Vietnam" was founded, with Foucault as one of its leading activists. Along with Glucksmann, Kouchner, Sartre, and Raymond Aron, the organization successfully lobbied President Valéry Giscard d'Estaing to increase France's quota for Vietnamese refugees.
The alliance with Kouchner and Glucksmann transformed Foucault into a passionate advocate of humanitarian intervention, or le droit d'ingérance: the moral imperative to intervene in the domestic affairs of a nation where human rights are being systematically violated. In 1981, Foucault addressed a major conference held at U.N. headquarters in Geneva where these themes were debated and discussed. In his speech, Foucault eloquently praised the responsibilities of"international citizenship," which, he claimed, "implies a commitment to rise up against any abuse of power, whoever its author, whoever its victims." "Amnesty International, Terre des Hommes, and Médecins du Monde," he continued, "are the initiatives which have created this new right; the right of private individuals to intervene effectively in the order of international policies and strategies." If Foucault retained aspects of his earlier, antihumanist worldview, they were certainly undetectable in his moving Geneva speech.
Later that year, Gen. Wojciech Jaruzelski declared martial law in Poland, brutally suppressing Solidarity, Eastern Europe's first independent trade union. The response by most Western European statesmen was a deafening silence. They judged the matter to be a purely "internal" Polish affair. They feared fanning the flames of the cold war. (Ronald Reagan's presidency had begun earlier that year.) So much for international solidarity. Better that the civilian populations of Eastern Europe passively endure the yoke of authoritarian rule. The recently elected French Socialist government had an additional, domestic political motivation to look the other way. It had come to power in an alliance with the French Communists. A rift over the "Polish question" risked fracturing the alliance.
At the behest of Pierre Bourdieu, Foucault once again sprang into action. The two intellectual luminaries jointly drafted an impassioned statement urging the Socialists not to repeat the ignominious blunders of 1936 — refusing to come to the aid of the embattled Spanish Republic — and 1956 — countenancing the Warsaw Pact's brutal invasion of Budapest. The statement was broadcast on French radio. Among its signatories were Glucksmann, Kouchner, Yves Montand, and Simone Signoret. Thereafter, the French government enacted a sudden volte-face, vigorously protesting the declaration of martial law. President François Mitterrand released a statement in support of the oppressed Poles. Prime Minister Pierre Mauroy abruptly canceled a forthcoming diplomatic visit to Warsaw. Led by Foucault, French intellectuals had risen to the occasion. It was not quite the Dreyfus affair. But it was a worthy performance nevertheless.
During the late 1970s, Foucault became acquainted with Robert Badinter, an influential jurist who was an avowed admirer of the philosopher's work on prisons and punishment. In 1981, Badinter became Mitterrand's minister of justice. One of his first official acts was to abolish the death penalty. Other progressive legislative measures followed: A draconian 1970 anti-riot act was invalidated, police surveillance of homosexuals was forbidden, and the dreaded maximum-security wings of French prisons were shut down. Badinter and Foucault developed a deep friendship. Undoubtedly, many of the minister's ideas on progressive penal reform had been inspired by Foucault's teachings and doctrines.
But did Foucault's new political self-understanding as a human-rights activist have any repercussions on his philosophical views? Emphatically so. This theme is the centerpiece of Eric Paras's provocative new book, Foucault 2.0: Beyond Power and Knowledge (Other Press). Paras deftly and painstakingly culls his evidence from Foucault's later Collège de France lectures, most of which remain unpublished. If his insights are correct, his study portends a veritable sea change in Foucault scholarship.
As Paras shows, in his later years Foucault had clearly become disenchanted with the research program he had honed during the mid-1970s in Discipline and Punish and The History of Sexuality. The treatment of "power" in these works proved too suffocating and monolithic. The idea of resistance to power seemed all but ruled out.
Two developments lend crucial support for Paras's hypothesis concerning Foucault's momentous paradigm shift, which, significantly, foreshadowed a rehabilitation of "man" and "subjectivity." First, Foucault abandoned the methodological tack he had outlined in The History of Sexuality, which focused on sexuality as a means for "power/knowledge" to extend its sinister hegemony. Instead, during his later years, he turned to a more positive concept of subjectivity, centered on the "art of living" in ancient Greece and Rome. Foucault had come to believe that such pre-Christian, pagan approaches to the idea of self-cultivation represented a valuable heuristic — a means to overcome the deficiencies of modern conceptions of the self. Second, the term "power/knowledge" itself is entirely absent from his later lectures and texts — a telling indication of how radically dissatisfied Foucault had become with the limitations of his earlier approach.
Paras's most radical and potentially controversial claim concerns Foucault's later re-evaluation of the idea of subjectivity. During the 1960s, as a card-carrying structuralist, Foucault, along with Roland Barthes, Jacques Lacan, and Louis Althusser, had celebrated the "death of the author" as a pendant to the fashionable postmodernist thesis concerning the "death of man." But as Paras remarks, if we know a great deal about Foucault's challenge to "the hegemony of 'man,' we are comparatively ignorant of the process by which he abandoned his hard structuralist position and later embraced the ideas that he had labored to undermine: liberty, individualism, 'human rights,' and even the thinking subject."
The goal of Foucault 2.0, then, is to fill this void. In fact, given Foucault's avowed fascination with Greco-Roman techniques of self-formation in studies such as The Care of the Self and The Use of Pleasure, it would be entirely reasonable to speak of a return of the subject in his later work. As Foucault remarks in a late interview, "I think it is characteristic of our society nowadays, that subjectivity has the right to assert itself, and to say ... 'that I cannot accept,' 'that I don't want,' or 'that I desire.'"
The evidence for this return is copious. In several key later texts, Foucault demonstrates an avowed fascination with what he calls an "aesthetics of existence": an approach to the self-mastery predicated on considerations of "style" or "aesthetics." According to Foucault (here, closely following Nietzsche), the Christian idea of self-mastery culminated in self-renunciation or self-abnegation. Hence, it was disturbingly life-negating. Conversely, in the ancient world, care of the self focused on "the choice of a beautiful life." Here, the goal of self-rule or autonomy was primarily aesthetic — hence, it was profoundly life-affirming. As Foucault enthusiastically remarks in a late interview, "The idea of the bios [life] as material for an aesthetic piece of art is something that fascinates me."
In Foucault's view, the Greco-Roman idea of aesthetic self-cultivation meshes with the central ideas of two main theorists of the modern self, Baudelaire and Nietzsche. Baudelaire's "dandyism" — his idea of turning one's own persona into a veritable work of art — became for the later Foucault a positive model of individual self-realization, as did Nietzsche's celebrated injunction in The Gay Science "to 'give style' to one's character — a great and rare art!" As Foucault explains: "What strikes me is the fact that in our society art has become something which is related to objects and not to individuals, or to life. ... But couldn't everyone's life become a work of art? Why should the lamp or the house be an art object, but not our life?"
Thereby, Foucault's work seems to have come full circle. Under the sign of aesthetic self-realization, Foucault rehabilitates and vindicates the rights of subjectivity. As Foucault avows, his new normative ideal is "the formation and development of a practice of Self, the objective of which is the constitution of oneself as the laborer of the beauty of one's own life."
French critics have long pointed to the central paradox of the North American Foucault reception: that a thinker who was so fastidious about hazarding positive political prescriptions, and who viewed affirmations of identity as a trap or as a form of normalization, could be lionized as the progenitor of the "identity politics" movement of the 1980s and 1990sa movement that, as Christopher Lasch demonstrated, had abandoned the ends of public commitment in favor of a "culture of narcissism." Paras's case for the "neohumanist" Foucault is persuasive and well documented. One wonders how long it will take Foucault's North American acolytes to reorient themselves in light of Paras's impressive findings. That would mean abandoning the fashionable preoccupation with "body politics" — the obsessive concern with a "different economy of bodies and pleasures" as a mode of transgression — and, following the later Foucault, according the claims of humanism their due.