Confusion

How divided is Iraq? For about 24 hours yesterday, the country was split into two time zones.

Iraq observes daylight savings time and had been planning to make the switch on Saturday, following the Friday day of prayer. So on Saturday morning, the U.S. military set its clocks ahead one hour.

But no one else seemed to follow. The clocks on state-owned TV stayed the same, so in our hotel, we remained on standard time and had our morning meeting at 9 a.m. as usual. Then word got out that the U.S. had switched. The Iraqi interior ministry called a press conference at noon and the U.S. military scheduled a related event at 3 p.m. These events were occurring just miles apart, but they were in different time zones, leaving reporters scrambling.

The Associated Press today tried to clear up the mess:

The confusion apparently stemmed from too much advance planning. The Iraqi government issued a statement two weeks ago saying that Daylight Savings Time would begin on March 31 ''by going forward one hour so that 12:00 p.m. Friday becomes 1:00 a.m. Saturday.''

The American military set its clocks forward, but the Iraqi Cabinet apparently changed its mind.... The Cabinet office confirmed the time change would occur on Sunday and declined to comment on the previous statement.

This morning Iraq was to make the switch. But at 9 a.m. (the "new" 9 a.m.) none of our staff
had reached the office. They trickled in by 10 a.m., and we finally decided to synchronize watches. Finally, I'd adjusted the time on my computer yesterday, but today Windows outsmarted me and adjusted it again, so that I was two hours ahead of where I was 24 hours before. Sigh. I'm going back to bed.

Pitching in

This post is a couple of days overdue. I'm writing from Baghdad, where I'll be doing a one-month stint in our Iraq bureau. My job is basically to help our fulltime bureau chief with the daily news report from Baghdad and contribute other feature stories from time to time. Reporters from throughout the company have come to Iraq since the invasion to do reporting stints; this is my first time here.

I arrived on Tuesday from Amman, Jordan, the starting point for most trips into Iraq. There you can get a visa and a couple of good nights' sleep before heading into the hot zone. From Amman there are daily flights to Baghdad -- and bless the folks at Royal Jordanian Airlines, they try to make it seem like the most normal thing in the world, right down to the crappy airline breakfast and the cheery welcome announcement from the flight attendant: "We thank you for flying with us and wish you a pleasant stay in Baghdad..."

Along with several Western media outlets, we have an office in a hotel complex less than a mile outside the "Green Zone" -- the fortress-like section of Baghdad that houses U.S. and Iraqi government offices. The drive from the airport to the hotel was only a couple of miles, but it took a half-hour as our two-car convoy (me and our fulltime security consultant up front in an armored early-model Mercedes, with a chase car in tow) got stuck in Baghdad's version of traffic jams.

Basically these occur at the numerous military checkpoints, or when convoys of military vehicles, many belonging to private security companies, appear on the roads. As these convoys are popular targets for insurgents, the other drivers tend to pull over or slow down to let them pass. We did this a few times. The danger hit home when Paul, our security adviser, pointed out a small roadside bomb that had exploded three days earlier and shattered the concrete median.

I've spent most of my first few days here following the daily news developments (Wednesday and Thursday were particularly brutal days, even by Iraqi standards) and getting to know our brave and talented Iraqi staff. About a dozen people work fulltime in the bureau with us, including five reporters, a handful of drivers, a cook and an irreplaceable office manager. It's well known by now that most of the newsgathering in Iraq for Western newspapers is done by Iraqi staffers, who sometimes risk their lives to get information and interviews in parts of the city that are off-limits to foreigners.

Many of our staffers write on a blog called "Inside Iraq" -- which I highly recommend because while many Western journalists blog about their experiences reporting in Iraq, almost nowhere else can you read the unvarnished views of the Iraqis themselves.

I realize that, for most people, what's happening in Iraq has become like white noise. I used to follow this story closely, but lately, if I had work to do, I rarely read past the headlines from Baghdad, which seem increasingly depressing. But in just a couple of days here, I've already become fascinated by this story all over again, and I'm looking forward to diving into it -- to the extent that I can. I'm not sure what the next few weeks will bring, but I'll try to post regularly and keep you all updated.

(Re)birth of a cocktail

It was probably one of the last summer weekends of the year - and one of the few where all my friends, and some guests, were in town - so we took advantage with a Sunday afternoon in Karen, the posh suburb south of Nairobi named for the Danish writer Karen Blixen. (She was the one played by Meryl Streep in "Out of Africa.") Karen is a lush playground for wealthy Kenyans, many of them descendants of the British settlers who came here about 100 years ago. As a result the place is known as cowboy country, as in "Kenyan cowboy" or "KC" for short, for the freewheeling outdoors lifestyle of the stereotypical White Kenyan.

The rest of us like the town for its great restaurants and gardens - the perfect setting for Sunday lunch. We opted for Talisman, which for my money is the most beautiful restaurant in Nairobi - a single-story house with the back torn off to reveal a huge garden. The dining area is inside-and-out, so you can sit under the sun on Afro-casual teak or under the roof on benches and cushions that are kind of Persian. It's just a really cool place. Inevitably you'll see some minor Kenyan celebrity, and Sunday was no exception - at the table next to us was seated the girlfriend of Tom Cholmondeley, a descendant of the famous Delamere family of settlers, who's currently on trial for the murder of a black stonemason on his massive ranch.

After Talisman's requisite fresh tangerine juice and awesome feta-and-coriander samosas (recently praised in the New York Times) we moved on to a friend's house for some drinks on the patio. That eventually gave way to a ritual viewing of "The Big Lebowski," which, to do just right, requires that you consume multiple White Russians (no sasparilla in Nairobi).

We had to make some local modifications - Kenya Gold coffee liqueur instead of ridiculously expensive imported Kahlua, locally distilled vodka sold under the Smirnoff name, and to top it off, off-the-shelf (as in non-refrigerated) milk, the kind favored by those without reliable electricity. (Powdered milk might have been more appropriate, but whatever.)

The drink would have made the Dude proud. It was so good, in fact, that we think it ought to be a fixture in Nairobi bars. Inspired by the afternoon in Karen, or the intoxicating combination of vodka and milk, we named our cocktail the White Kenyan, and eventually the KC. Look for it in soon in your favorite Nairobi watering hole.

Passport fever

If you're an American and you own a passport, you're in the minority among our countrymen. Recent estimates say that 21 percent of Americans hold passports - a fact that my snootier European friends tend to believe explains everything about my country. A few weeks ago two friends who left Nairobi for London last year returned on holiday with their 10-month-old son. I marveled at the baby's ability to make that long journey. That's nothing, the father said - they'd taken him to Australia over Christmas.

Yes, not even a year old, and he's got a passport with more stamps than most Americans get in their lifetimes.

This may be changing. The number of people applying for passports each year actually declined in the late 1980s and early 1990s, but now it's rising fast. The L.A. Times reports that the State Department will issue a record 17 million passports this year - up from 12 million last year and 10 million the year before. People are being forced to wait up to 10 weeks for new passports as the agency tries to cope with the demand; even the $60-extra expedited service, which I love, now takes four weeks or longer, the paper says.

No doubt part of the rush is due to new travel rules that require Americans to have passports to travel to Canada, Mexico and the Caribbean. But that law doesn't take effect until next year. The trendline of American passport-holders clearly points upward.

People like to find all kinds of symbols of American provincialism, from the diminishing coverage of foreign affairs in our newspapers and TV news programs to the blind way we went into Iraq. And wasn't 9/11 supposed to discourage Americans from traveling abroad?

So while it's mostly symbolic - and while I'm sure that the bulk of the new passports will be used to travel to a foreign country that's accessible by car - I think this passport surge is a hopeful development. Despite all the opposition worldwide to the United States right now, it tells the world, Hey, we're coming anyway.

Still reliving the Mog

It was a great weekend in Nairobi, where we're still enjoying summer weather despite the looming long rains of April. Saturday night we had dinner al fresco at Azalea, a continental restaurant that, true to its name, has a beautiful garden patio - but a weird Mexican motif, including a white stucco entryway that reminded me of a Taco Bell. The seared tuna was good, but man what I wouldn't do for a decent taco.

Last night we barbecued at the home of a correspondent for one of the British papers. It took the fire a while to get going, a fact that I blame on inferior charcoal and not my rusty grilling skills. (And why was I made in charge of the grill? Leave it to a Brit to host a barbecue without knowing how to light one.) Finally someone arrived with a plastic soda bottle filled with kerosene, and we were on our way.

I found myself answering a lot of questions about my recent trip to Mogadishu. With all the news about insurgents firing rockets at the airport, wasn't it, as someone put it last night, "pretty stupid" to fly into that city on a commercial plane? What I said, and failed to mention in the post, was that my plane was special.

It was loaded with Kenyan-grown khat - a green plant that, when chewed, acts as a mild narcotic. Khat is king in the Muslim nations of the Horn of Africa, where men spend an inordinate amount of their time and money on the habit, but most of those countries don't grow it. The best khat, so they say, comes from the highlands of Kenya and Ethiopia and arrives by the ton several times a week on commercial planes. It's a way of life, and a big business; part of the reason why so many Somalis grew annoyed with the Islamic courts leadership last year was that they banned the trade in khat for religious reasons. Now the clerics are gone and the khat is back. And there was no way that any good Somali was going to shoot down my plane loaded with the good stuff.

It got us to talking about our worst flight experiences in Africa. There was the Russian guy who sat next to me on the Mogadishu flight, which was operated by Daallo Airlines, which leases old ex-Soviet jets - and even older ex-Soviet pilots. The guy was wearing a blue jumpsuit unbuttoned to his abdomen and clutching a screwdriver, and when the plane landed at one of the many stops we made along the route, he'd jump out onto the tarmac (or dirt, as the case may be) and start tightening stuff with the screwdriver. It made me shudder.

So did talking to one of the stewardesses, who said she grew up in Siberia and joined the airline industry so she could see the world. I don't know much about Siberia, but that seemed like a bad decision.

Beautiful Mogadishu

"You got out of Somalia just in time," people keep telling me. It seems they're right. I just came back from a week in Mogadishu, sometimes described as the most dangerous city in the world, and now things have really started to get nasty there. Peacekeeping troops from Uganda have just arrived in the country - the first international military mission in the country since the early 1990s, and the "Black Hawk Down" incident that drove U.S. troops out of Somalia.

Insurgents are attacking the Ugandans daily, and civilians are being killed - 12 people in one attack alone on Wednesday. It's not clear who the insurgents are, except that they're anti-government, although many people in Mogadishu believe they're linked to the recently ousted Islamic courts militias, whose leaders are urging an uprising against "foreign forces" inside the country.

Not that the previous week was completely quiet. Every day in Mogadishu we heard something - gunshots, a mortar blast or rumors of worse. If Somalia could export rumors, it would be a rich country. I was staying in a place called, hopefully, the Peace Hotel. The owner, a young guy named Bashiir, refuses to host government delegations, U.N. officials or other groups that would make him a lot of money, but could also turn the hotel into an insurgent target. So the Peace is relatively safe. When I was there the only other guests were a Canadian journalist and a handful of Somali-Norwegian NGO workers.

The best thing about Mogadishu is the weather, cooled by the ocean breeze and perfect in the evenings. In the 1970s, thanks to the pristine beaches and Italianate architecture, it was one of the most picturesque cities in Africa, and nowadays you can still buy t-shirts that say "Beautiful Mogadishu." Of course, if you're a foreigner, you can really only buy them inside your (heavily guarded) hotel compound.

Anyway, because of the great weather, we spent our evenings on the roof of the Peace, eating fresh fish for dinner and listening to the Somalis tell stories about their country's glorious past - and, more entertainingly, the bumbling new government. Several of the stories revolved around illiterate Cabinet ministers who contradicted communiques from their own ministries - because they couldn't read them.

Occasionally, the laughter would stop when the sound of gunfire rang through the air, which happened at least once a night. Then each of the Somalis would be on the phone with friends to figure out who or what was hit, and within minutes we'd have a pretty reliable report, which in itself provided some measure of security. Like I said, Somalis love to talk, which made it a pretty fantastic place to be a journalist. But there's a lot of rumor and fiction to sort through, and very few methods of getting accurate information other than talking to as many people as possible.

In that spirit, I ventured out of the Peace compound every day to meet people in various parts of the city. Traveling in Mogadishu these days, you need an armed escort, so everywhere we drove, we were trailed by Bashiir's personal security detail - four guys with machine guns riding in an SUV. This was moderately reassuring except for the times that we got stuck in traffic in dicey, government-controlled neighborhoods and the SUV was stuck right along with us.

A few times I went to meet government officials at their hotels. (The government being weak and Mogadishu being unstable, the officials haven't tried to buy homes or put down any roots in town; they live out of shabby VIP rooms in rundown hotels.) We'd get near the hotel and suddenly there would be cars all around us - usually minibuses, sometimes passenger cars ferrying members of government or their flunkies.

These were the moments when I sensed danger - that if the hotel were to be hit, and all government hotels in Mogadishu have been bombed recently, we and our security detail would be stuck in traffic, unable to move.

That fear hit home when I read about Wednesday's attack, which occurred just outside the Global Hotel. I'd spent a couple of afternoons there. On my last day in Mogadishu I had lunch there with one of the guests, the mayor of Mogadishu, Mahamud Hassan Ali, who goes by the nickname (everyone in Somalia has a nickname) is Adde Gabbow. Just the idea of being mayor of Mogadishu is pretty astonishing, a thought that New York Times correspondent Marc Lacey spelled out beautifully in a profile last year.

Adde Gabbow is a pretty interesting guy. For several years, like so many Somali expatriates, he lived in the Minneapolis area, where he ran a janitorial service and built it into one of the largest such companies in the state. But when his boyhood friend, Ali Mohammed Gedi, was named prime minister of the new Somali transitional government, Adde Gabbow was asked to return to serve his home country. His wife refused to go with him. His two adult children remained in university in the U.S., one an undergraduate and the other a Master's candidate. Both will graduate this spring, and Adde Gabbow plans to be there for both ceremonies.

Lunch was a Dr. Atkins nightmare - rice and pasta and three different sugary fruit juices - but I focused on the fish. I asked the mayor what Somalia needed from the international community. "We need a Marshall Plan," he said. "We need the entire social network to be rebuilt. Somalia was destroyed." The U.S., U.K. and other donor countries have ponied up tens of millions of dollars to bolster the government. But its leaders are not doing a great job of showing they're worthy of it. They refuse to negotiate with political opponents, and Somalia being an intensely clan-oriented society, that stubbornness is part of what's fueling the insurgency.

I asked the mayor whether he thought the government needed to be more inclusive. He sort of shrugged and didn't really answer the question. The meal was ending, and now we were getting into the sensitive stuff. After a while I gave up and asked him about his life in the U.S. "Minneapolis is very cold, but a very nice city," he said through an interpreter, and added proudly that his local paper (the formerly McClatchy-owned Minneapolis Star-Tribune) wrote a profile of him when he was named mayor.

It surprised me that he could have spent several years in the Midwest, built such a strong business and raised two successful children and not have gained at least some mastery of English. It spoke to the other talents he must have possessed in abundance, and to rescue his city, or at least keep it together, he needs those talents now more than ever.