From Counterculture to Cyberculture

Fred Turner
From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism
©2006, 354 pages, 16 halftones
Cloth $29.00 ISBN: 0-226-81741-5

		See also: Read an excerpt from Chapter 4: “Taking the Whole Earth Digital” Our catalog of books in computer science and information studies Our catalog of history titles Other excerpts and online essays from University of Chicago Press titles Sign up for e-mail notification of new books in this and other subjects Subscribe to RSS feeds Read the Chicago Blog	Fred Turner, Assistant Professor, Communications, Stanford University http://communication.ucsd.edu/fturner/

In the mid-1990s, as first the Internet and then the World Wide Web swung into public view, talk of revolution filled the air. Politics, economics, the nature of the self—all seemed to teeter on the edge of transformation. The Internet was about to "flatten organizations, globalize society, decentralize control, and help harmonize people," as MIT's Nicholas Negroponte put it. The stodgy men in gray flannel suits who had so confidently roamed the corridors of industry would shortly disappear, and so too would the chains of command on which their authority depended. In their place, wrote Negroponte and dozens of others, the Internet would bring about the rise of a new "digital generation"—playful, self-sufficient, psychologically whole—and it would see that generation gather, like the Net itself, into collaborative networks of independent peers. States too would melt away, their citizens lured back from archaic party-based politics to the "natural" agora of the digitized marketplace. Even the individual self, so long trapped in the human body, would finally be free to step outside its fleshy confines, explore its authentic interests, and find others with whom it might achieve communion. Ubiquitous networked computing had arrived, and in its shiny array of interlinked devices, pundits, scholars, and investors alike saw the image of an ideal society: decentralized, egalitarian, harmonious, and free.

But how did this happen? Only thirty years earlier, computers had been the tools and emblems of the same unfeeling industrial-era social machine whose collapse they now seemed ready to bring about. In the winter of 1964, for instance, students marching for free speech at the University of California at Berkeley feared that America's political leaders were treating them as if they were bits of abstract data. One after another, they took up blank computer cards, punched them through with new patterns of holes—"FSM" and "STRIKE"—and hung them around their necks. One student even pinned a sign to his chest that parroted the cards' user instructions: "I am a UC student. Please do not fold, bend, spindle or mutilate me." For the marchers of the Free Speech Movement, as for many other Americans throughout the 1960s, computers loomed as technologies of dehumanization, of centralized bureaucracy and the rationalization of social life, and, ultimately, of the Vietnam War. Yet, in the 1990s, the same machines that had served as the defining devices of cold-war technocracy emerged as the symbols of its transformation. Two decades after the end of the Vietnam War and the fading of the American counterculture, computers somehow seemed poised to bring to life the countercultural dream of empowered individualism, collaborative community, and spiritual communion. How did the cultural meaning of information technology shift so drastically?

As a number of journalists and historians have suggested, part of the answer is technological. By the 1990s, the room-sized, stand-alone calculating machines of the cold-war era had largely disappeared. So too had the armored rooms in which they were housed and the army of technicians that supported them. Now Americans had taken up microcomputers, some the size of notebooks, all of them available to the individual user, regardless of his or her institutional standing. These new machines could perform a range of tasks that far exceeded even the complex calculations for which digital computers had first been built. They became communication devices and were used to prepare novels and spreadsheets, pictures and graphs. Linked over telephone wires and fiber-optic cables, they allowed their users to send messages to one another, to download reams of information from libraries around the world, and to publish their own thoughts on the World Wide Web. In all of these ways, changes in computer technology expanded the range of uses to which computers could be put and the types of social relations they were able to facilitate.

As dramatic as they were, however, these changes alone do not account for the particular utopian visions to which computers became attached. The fact that a computer can be put on a desktop, for instance, and that it can be used by an individual, does not make it a "personal" technology. Nor does the fact that individuals can come together by means of computer networks necessarily require that their gatherings become "virtual communities." On the contrary, as Shoshanna Zuboff has pointed out, in the office, desktop computers and computer networks can become powerful tools for integrating the individual ever more closely into the corporation. At home, those same machines not only allow schoolchildren to download citations from the public library; they also turn the living room into a digital shopping mall. For retailers, the computer in the home becomes an opportunity to harvest all sorts of information about potential customers. For all the utopian claims surrounding the emergence of the Internet, there is nothing about a computer or a computer network that necessarily requires that it level organizational structures, render the individual more psychologically whole, or drive the establishment of intimate, though geographically distributed, communities.

How was it, then, that computers and computer networks became linked to visions of peer-to-peer ad-hocracy, a leveled marketplace, and a more authentic self? Where did these visions come from? And who enlisted computing machines to represent them?

To answer these questions, this book traces the previously untold history of an extraordinarily influential group of San Francisco Bay area journalists and entrepreneurs: Stewart Brand and the Whole Earth network. Between the late 1960s and the late 1990s, Brand assembled a network of people and publications that together brokered a series of encounters between bohemian San Francisco and the emerging technology hub of Silicon Valley to the south. In 1968 Brand brought members of the two worlds together in the pages of one of the defining documents of the era, the Whole Earth Catalog. In 1985 he gathered them again on what would become perhaps the most influential computer conferencing system of the decade, the Whole Earth Lectronic Link, or the WELL. Throughout the late 1980s and early 1990s, Brand and other members of the network, including Kevin Kelly, Howard Rheingold, Esther Dyson, and John Perry Barlow, became some of the most-quoted spokespeople for a countercultural vision of the Internet. In 1993 all would help create the magazine that, more than any other, depicted the emerging digital world in revolutionary terms: Wired.

By recounting their history, this book reveals and helps to explain a complex intertwining of two legacies: that of the military-industrial research culture, which first appeared during World War II and flourished across the cold-war era, and that of the American counterculture. Since the 1960s scholarly and popular accounts alike have described the counterculture in terms first expressed by its members—that is, as a culture antithetical to the technologies and social structures powering the cold-war state and its defense industries. In this view the 1940s and 1950s are often seen as a gray time shaped by rigid social norms, hierarchical institutions, and the constant demands of America's nuclear face-off with the Soviet Union. The 1960s seem to explode onto the scene in a Technicolor swirl of personal exploration and political protest, much of it aimed at bringing down the cold-war military-industrial bureaucracy. Those who accept this version of events tend to account for the persistence of the military-industrial complex today, and for the continuing growth of corporate capitalism and consumer culture as well, by arguing that the authentically revolutionary ideals of the generation of 1968 were somehow co-opted by the forces they opposed.

There is some truth to this story. Yet, as it has hardened into legend, this version of the past has obscured the fact the same military-industrial research world that brought forth nuclear weapons—and computers—also gave rise to a free-wheeling, interdisciplinary, and highly entrepreneurial style of work. In the research laboratories of World War II and later, in the massive military engineering projects of the cold war, scientists, soldiers, technicians, and administrators broke down the invisible walls of bureaucracy and collaborated as never before. As they did, they embraced both computers and a new cybernetic rhetoric of systems and information. They began to imagine institutions as living organisms, social networks as webs of information, and the gathering and interpretation of information as keys to understanding not only the technical but also the natural and social worlds.

By the late 1960s, so too did substantial elements of the counterculture. Between 1967 and 1970, for instance, tens of thousands of young people set out to establish communes, many in the mountains and the woods. It was for them that Brand first published the Whole Earth Catalog. For these back-to-the-landers, and for many others who never actually established new communities, traditional political mechanisms for creating social change had come up bankrupt. Even as their peers organized political parties and marched against the Vietnam War, this group, whom I will call the New Communalists, turned away from political action and toward technology and the transformation of consciousness as the primary sources of social change. If mainstream America had become a culture of conflict, with riots at home and war abroad, the commune world would be one of harmony. If the American state deployed massive weapons systems in order to destroy faraway peoples, the New Communalists would deploy small-scale technologies—ranging from axes and hoes to amplifiers, strobe lights, slide projectors, and LSD—to bring people together and allow them to experience their common humanity. Finally, if the bureaucracies of industry and government demanded that men and women become psychologically fragmented specialists, the technology-induced experience of togetherness would allow them to become both self-sufficient and whole once again.

For this wing of the counterculture, the technological and intellectual output of American research culture held enormous appeal. Although they rejected the military-industrial complex as a whole, as well as the political process that brought it into being, hippies from Manhattan to Haight-Ashbury read Norbert Wiener, Buckminster Fuller, and Marshall McLuhan. Through their writings, young Americans encountered a cybernetic vision of the world, one in which material reality could be imagined as an information system. To a generation that had grown up in a world beset by massive armies and by the threat of nuclear holocaust, the cybernetic notion of the globe as a single, interlinked pattern of information was deeply comforting: in the invisible play of information, many thought they could see the possibility of global harmony.

To Stewart Brand and later to other members of the Whole Earth group, cybernetics also presented a set of social and rhetorical resources for entrepreneurship. In the early 1960s, not long after graduating from Stanford University, Brand found his way into the bohemian art worlds of San Francisco and New York. Like many of the artists around him at the time, and like Norbert Wiener, in whose writings on cybernetics they were immersed, Brand quickly became what sociologist Ronald Burt has called a "network entrepreneur." That is, he began to migrate from one intellectual community to another and, in the process, to knit together formerly separate intellectual and social networks. In the Whole Earth Catalog era, these networks spanned the worlds of scientific research, hippie homesteading, ecology, and mainstream consumer culture. By the 1990s they would include representatives of the Defense Department, the U.S. Congress, global corporations such as Shell Oil, and makers of all sorts of digital software and equipment.

Brand brought these communities together in a series of what I will call network forums. Drawing on the systems rhetoric of cybernetics and on models of entrepreneurship borrowed from both the research and the countercultural worlds, Brand established a series of meetings, publications, and digital networks within which members of multiple communities could meet and collaborate and imagine themselves as members of a single community. These forums in turn generated new social networks, new cultural categories, and new turns of phrase. In 1968 Brand founded the Whole Earth Catalog in order to help those heading back to the land find the tools they would need to build their new communities. These items included the fringed deerskin jackets and geodesic domes favored by the communards, but they also included the cybernetic musings of Norbert Wiener and the latest calculators from Hewlett-Packard. In later editions, alongside discussions of such supplies, Brand published letters from high-technology researchers next to firsthand reports from rural hippies. In the process, he offered commune-based subscribers a chance to see their own ambitions as commensurate with the technological achievements of mainstream America, and he gave technologists the opportunity to imagine their diodes and relays as tools, like those the commune dwellers favored, for the transformation of individual and collective consciousness. Together, the creators and readers of the Whole Earth Catalog helped to synthesize a vision of technology as a countercultural force that would shape public understandings of computing and other machines long after the social movements of the 1960s had faded from view.

In the 1980s and 1990s, as computers became ever smaller and more interconnected, and as corporations began to employ increasingly flexible modes of production, Brand and his colleagues repeated this process at the WELL, in the Global Business Network, through Wired, and in a series of meetings and organizations associated with all three. In each case, a network entrepreneur (often Brand himself) gathered members of multiple communities within a single material or textual space. The members of those networks collaborated on the various projects at hand and developed a shared language for their work. Out of that language emerged shared understandings—of the potential social impact of computing, of information and information technologies as metaphors for social processes, and of the nature of work in a networked economic order. Often enough, the systems on which network members appeared became models in their own right of these new understandings. Even when they did not, members often took the insights they had gleaned back into their social and professional worlds. In this way ideas born within Whole Earth–derived network forums became key frames through which both public and professional technologists sought to comprehend the potential social impact of information and information technologies. Over time, the network's members and forums helped redefine the microcomputer as a "personal" machine, computer communication networks as "virtual communities," and cyberspace itself as the digital equivalent of the western landscape into which so many communards set forth in the late 1960s, the "electronic frontier."

At the same time, and by means of the same social processes, members of the Whole Earth network made themselves visible and credible spokesmen for the socio-technical visions that they had helped create. Traditionally, sociologists have depicted journalists in terms set by the professional norms of newspapers and magazines: as reporters of a consensus achieved among communities from which they were analytically, if not actually, separated. In this view, a reporter's prestige depends on her or his ability to dig up new information, report it in a compelling way, and make it visible to a broad public (which itself is seen as analytically distinct from either the community of sources or the community of journalists). Brand and other writers and editors associated with the Whole Earth publications developed extraordinary reputations as journalists, winning, among other prizes, the National Book Award (for the Whole Earth Catalog) and the National Magazine Award (for Wired). They did so, however, by building the communities on whose activities they were reporting. Within Whole Earth–sponsored network forums, and within the books and articles they spawned, representatives of the technological world met leaders from politics and business, as well as former counterculturalists. Together, their conversations turned digital media into emblems of network members' own, shared ways of living, and evidence of their individual credibility. Again and again, Brand, and later Kevin Kelly, Howard Rheingold, John Perry Barlow, and others, gave voice to the techno-social visions that emerged in these discussions.

As they did, they were welcomed into the halls of Congress, the boardrooms of major corporations, and the hotels of Davos, Switzerland, home of the World Economic Forum. By the mid-1990s, throughout much of the mainstream press and in business and government as well, the networked entrepreneurship of the Whole Earth group and its self-evident financial and social success had become evidence for the transformative power of what many had begun to call the "New Economy." According to a raft of politicians and pundits, the rapid integration of computing and telecommunications technologies into international economic life, coupled with dramatic rounds of corporate layoffs and restructuring, had given rise to a new economic era. Individuals could now no longer count on the support of their employers; they would instead have to become entrepreneurs, moving flexibly from place to place, sliding in and out of collaborative teams, building their knowledge bases and skill sets in a process of constant self-education. The proper role of government in this new environment, many argued, was to pull back, to deregulate the technology industries that were ostensibly leading the transformation, and, while they were at it, business in general.

Proponents of this view included telecommunications executives, high-tech stock analysts, and right-wing politicians. Kevin Kelly, a former editor of the quarterly Whole Earth Review, which had grown out of the original Catalog, helped to bring them all to the pages of Wired. As the magazine's executive editor, he argued that the world was a series of interlocking information systems, all of which were working to corrode the bureaucracies of the industrial era. To Kelly and the other creators of Wired, the suddenly public Internet appeared to be both the infrastructure and the symbol of the new economic era. And if it was, they suggested, then those who built their lives around the Net and those who sought to deregulate the newly networked marketplace might in fact be harbingers of a cultural revolution. In the pages of Wired, at least, this new elite featured the citizens of the WELL, the members of the Global Business Network, and the founders of the Electronic Frontier Foundation—all groups well woven into the fabric of the Whole Earth community—as well as Microsoft's Bill Gates, libertarian pundits such as George Gilder, and, on the cover of one issue, conservative Republican Congressman Newt Gingrich.

To those who think of the 1960s primarily as a break with the decades that went before, the coming together of former counterculturalists, corporate executives, and right-wing politicians and pundits may appear impossibly contradictory. But as the history of the Whole Earth network suggests, it isn't. As they turned away from agonistic politics and toward technology, consciousness, and entrepreneurship as the principles of a new society, the communards of the 1960s developed a utopian vision that was in many ways quite congenial to the insurgent Republicans of the 1990s. Although Newt Gingrich and those around him decried the hedonism of the 1960s counterculture, they shared its widespread affection for empowering technologically enabled elites, for building new businesses, and for rejecting traditional forms of governance. And as they rose to power, more than a few right-wing politicians and executives longed to share the hip credibility of people like Stewart Brand.

This book, then, does not tell the story of a countercultural movement whose ideals and practices were appropriated by the forces of capital, technology, or the state. Rather, it demonstrates that the New Communalist wing of the counterculture embraced those forces early on and that in subsequent years, Stewart Brand and the Whole Earth network continued to provide the intellectual and practical contexts within which members of the two worlds could come together and legitimate one another's projects. At the same time, however, this book is not a biography of Stewart Brand. Brand certainly deserves a biography, and one will no doubt be written in the years to come, but this book makes relatively little effort to understand Brand's personal history except insofar as it illuminates his role in reshaping the politics of information. Brand has had a substantial influence in other areas, especially ecology and architectural design, as well as a fascinating personal life, but these will have to wait for other chroniclers. My aim here is to make visible Brand's impact, and that of the networks he helped build, on our understandings of computing and its possible relations to social life. Within this story, Brand is both an influential actor in his own right and an exemplary promoter of a new, networked mode of techno-social life; so too are the journalists, consultants, and entrepreneurs of the Whole Earth network, which is by now far-flung. My challenge in writing this book has been to keep in view simultaneously Brand's unique individual talents, the networking tactics he employed, and the increasing influence of the networks he helped build.

For that reason, I begin with an overview of the broad transformation in popular perceptions of computing that has occurred over the past forty years, and a reminder of the forgotten affinities between cold-war research culture and the counterculture of the New Communalists. I then turn to following Stewart Brand, first into the early 1960s art scene, then to the communes of the Southwest, into the back rooms of Bay area computer science in the 1970s, and on into the corporate world in the 1980s and 1990s. Along the way, I pause to examine in some detail the networks and network forums that Brand has built. As these explorations suggest, Brand's influence on popular understandings of technology has depended not only on his considerable talent for spotting the forward edges of social and technological change, but also on the richness and complexity of the networks he has assembled. I conclude by arguing that Brand's entrepreneurial tactics, and the now-widespread association of computers and computer-mediated communication with the egalitarian social ideals of the counterculture, have become important features of an increasingly networked mode of living, working, and deploying social and cultural power.

Although it is tempting to think of that mode as a product of a revolution in computing technology, I argue that the revolution it represents began long before the public appearance of the Internet or even the widespread distribution of computers. It began in the wake of World War II, as the cybernetic discourse and collaborative work styles of cold-war military research came together with the communitarian social vision of the counterculture.

Copyright notice: Excerpt from pages 1-9 of From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism by Fred Turner, published by the University of Chicago Press. ©2006 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. This text may be used and shared in accordance with the fair-use provisions of U.S. copyright law, and it may be archived and redistributed in electronic form, provided that this entire notice, including copyright information, is carried and provided that the University of Chicago Press is notified and no fee is charged for access. Archiving, redistribution, or republication of this text on other terms, in any medium, requires the consent of the University of Chicago Press. (Footnotes and other references included in the book may have been removed from this online version of the text.)

For information on purchasing the book—from bookstores or here online—please go to the webpage for From Counterculture to Cyberculture.

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of monsters and maidens

bibliOdyssey has this cool posting on well, monsters and maidens:

"Femme Assise Fumant l'Opium"
1823 crayon drawing by Alexandre Bida

"Une loge d'Actrice" by Victor Giraud

watercolour sketch 3rd quarter 19th cent.

'Grande découverte d'un monstre

extraordinaire dans la forêt des Ardennes'
In: "Monstres humains, Géants, Nains, Centenaires, hommes
extraordinaires, singuliers, et autres bizarreries de la nature"(undated)

look at the original post on bibliOdyssey

Chris Jordan

Los Angeles, CA. The Paul Kopeikin Gallery is pleased to present “In Katrina’s Wake: Portraits of Loss from an Unnatural Disaster”, an exhibition by artist Chris Jordan.

The exhibition will open on September 9th and runs through October 14th, 2006. A signing of Mr. Jordan’s new book “In Katrina’s Wake” will begin at 5pm. A reception will take place on Saturday, September 9th from 6:00 to 8:00pm. The reception is free and open to the public. The gallery is located at 6150 Wilshire Blvd, just west of Fairfax. For more information please visit our website at www.paulkopeikingallery.com or www.chrisjordan.com.

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.