MANAMA, Bahrain — It’s the height of the holiday season and I’m hiding in the men’s room in the executive suite of a big steel-and-glass bank building, scarfing a Snickers bar and stealing sips of bottled water while no one’s looking because I don’t want to offend anyone. The problem is, it’s Ramadan and I’m in Manama, the capital city of the island nation of Bahrain off the Saudi Arabian coast south of Kuwait, and by religious bent and in some cases by law the secretaries and executives I encounter in the day-long series of meetings I’ve been stuck in for two and a half weeks aren’t able to offer me coffee or even a glass of water. Everyone is fasting from sun-up to sun-down, suffering the ever more gnawing stomach burn and squirm of uncomfortability that comes from not eating or drinking all day.

So I’m locked in a men’s room huffing chocolate. It seems outlandish, but really it’s a mild inconvenience, given the good fortune of finding myself on a magazine assignment in Bahrain. Although it’s Ramadan everywhere else, at least I can get room service whenever I get back to my hotel.

While the Muslim holy month of Ramadan is more like Easter than Christmas (or maybe more like Lent), it shares some characteristics with both Christian and Jewish holidays. (All three religions are based on the same text, after all.) At the end of the month there’s a great three-day party, called Eid Al-Fitr, when everyone dresses their houses in fairy lights, goes visiting and sits through an endless string of dinners with the relatives.

During Ramadan itself, as during Hanukkah, it’s sunset that determines when the fun begins. Only instead of lighting candles and giving out gelt, Muslims make the infinitely wiser move of gorging themselves on as much food as possible, keeping almost Spanish hours, and doing as little as possible during the day before closing up shop around 2 p.m. to head home and wait for the sun to set and the food fest to begin again. The restaurants are closed all day, and it’s illegal for even Westerners like myself to eat, drink or smoke outside.

Far be it from me, a non-denominational American in a Muslim nation at a time of unprecedented tension, another bombing next door in Saudi Arabia, and scary-sounding security warnings – stuff like “avoid places where Westerners might congregate” – far be it from me to step on my hosts’ highly inconvenient religious practices by inconsiderately indulging my hunger pangs in public. Hence the clandestine chocolate bar.

When I get a call from Moniem, an enthusiastic young stockbroker I’ve met at a Ramadan supper given by the stock exchange (their Christmas party, more or less), I’m ambivalent about going out. But it’s only in New York that I’ve ever been actually assaulted, and hey, how many times am I going to be in Manama on a Saturday night? So at 9:30 I meet him in the lobby of my hotel and we pile into his cousin Najeeb’s Suzuki Vitara and head downtown for what sounds to me like a gallery opening. “We can go see some paintings,” Najeeb, a back-office accountant, tells me. And all I can think is how fitting it is, somehow, that I should find Manhattan culture being imitated so far from New York.

It takes about two minutes to drive to downtown Manama from my hotel. It takes about two minutes to drive pretty much anywhere in Bahrain, an island about thirty miles long and only ten across. Most of the country’s 750,000 citizens live in Manama, at the northeast tip, but a few towns are sprinkled further down the dusty island, as are a U.S. naval base, a lushly irrigated golf course, and, weirdly, the Middle East’s first Formula 1 racing circuit.

The city itself is a mix of Financial District Modern and two- and three-story Colonial Stucco buildings of the kind found from Manila to Mozambique. Aspiring boulevards emanate from honking traffic circles only to bog down in one-lane back streets that wind around mosques, souqs, tea shops and grill restaurants. It’s a mellow city with a happening nightlife (this is where the Saudis come to cut loose, after all), but even during Ramadan there’s the impression that business is getting done.

Tonight the streets are alive. It’s only a few blocks from our parking spot behind the stock exchange building to the warren of narrow alleys that constitutes the old souq, but we walk them in the company of dozens of other Arabs all headed in the same direction. I lope along behind Najeeb from square to square, followed by Moniem and a melismatic soundtrack of Arabic music. It’s as crowded as an American subway at rush hour and I have to dip my shoulder between passers-by to keep up. I am the only white guy in sight, but no one seems to notice.

We stop on a corner where a man is serving something Tang-like in little plastic cups, but when I try to pay the cousins laugh at me. The crowd is lighter here, but they are still coming and going in all directions as if headed to a rock concert maybe, stopping to greet each other in the street or not stopping but just smiling and waving as they go past. At the end of the street I can see a building that’s somehow grand and squat at the same time, its soaring face a brilliant aquamarine festooned with tall ornate Arabic writing in white and gold. Most of the people passing by are either women in black abaya or men in white dish-dasha, the heel-length robe that is the standard men’s uniform in the Arab Gulf (though both Moniem and Najeeb wear American-style clothes). A couple of girls go by in the long robes and headscarves that leave only their faces revealed. Najeeb stares after them hungrily and asks me if I think they look nice.

Moniem is otherwise occupied. “Not so many paintings,” he tells me, looking disappointed, and it takes me a moment to realize he’s referring not to art in a gallery but to paintings like the one on the banner being carried toward us by two young men, of a bearded Muslim preacher or prophet or maybe even an ayatollah. “Maybe we see some music,” Moniem says. And as if on cue, a little cart like a laundromat wagon comes trundling around the corner with a loudspeaker teetering on a pole sticking out of it, powered by a car battery and tended by two young men in black slacks and black button-down shirts, broadcasting the words of the bearded, black-robed man who leads them. A phalanx of clarinetists, also in black, follows along, joined here and there by a trumpet or two, all tootling the same dirge-like Arabic melody, and between them and the imam’s sermon – it’s enough to drown out all the other noise on the street and focus my attention completely on the scene.

The musicians march four abreast but the street is only eight or ten feet wide, and Najeeb’s would-be girlfriends scamper down a side alley to get out of the way. Everyone else stands to one side or another and as the marchers go past, I suddenly find myself pressed into a doorway, transfixed by the musicians’ clamor and then by the long double column of men who follow behind them. They come in a slow, leg-swinging pantomime of a march, all dressed in black (some in what could pass for business attire, some in jeans and AC/DC tour shirts), and all in their 20s and 30s and 40s, neither too young nor too old, the same solemn expression on each man’s face. Each one carries a short bundle of chains fixed to a wooden handle, and as he rotates his torso through each step, he throws one arm over the opposite shoulder to deliver himself a ceremonial blow.

Once I get the hang of Moniem’s English, I understand that we’re out on the night of the Muslim year that commemorates the martyrdom of Imam Ali, who founded the Shiite sect of Islam in the Seventh century and who is apparently buried in Iraq’s holy city, Najaf. The men performing the ceremonial self-flagellation known as latmiyaat are expressing the sect’s 1,350-year-old grief – much as Christians commemorate Christ’s death and resurrection at Easter (or did, until the vapid bunnies and painted eggs got the better of them).

The streets of Manama are a million miles away from Manhattan and art galleries and insipid wine-guzzling scenesters – though even crowded into the doorway with a strange religious procession swirling through the night streets in front of me, I can’t help feeling momentarily like a five o’clock-shadowed Brad Pitt in the second act of a multi-million-dollar filmed-on-location epic of love, loss and bad line readings. When the procession passes, my co-stars and I wander on through the rough hodge-podge of three- and four-story whitewashed buildings. Thin short alleys let onto small rectangles of open space where kids run around and kick balls while the adults chat like friendly neighbors on the sidelines of a Fourth of July parade. Where five streets meet and somehow form a square, more than a hundred women dressed in black are seated on the ground, listening to the story of Imam Ali’s life. A more vitriolic sermon emerges from a mosque that appears suddenly, recessed between two buildings across the street from a row of storefronts. Amid the rapid-fire Arabic, one semi-familiar word surfaces from time to time: Amreeka. America. The security warnings return to my mind, but in this crowd I somehow feel more safe than threatened. This is not a place where Westerners might congregate, after all. “Don’t worry,” Moniem tells me. “It is George Bush they do not like, not you.”

Without my noticing, we’ve wandered back toward the car. The crowds have thinned out a bit, the procession has broken up. The breeze coming off the Manama waterfront, a block away, is downright cool. “What do you want to do now?” Moniem asks me. I hardly have an answer. Najeeb breaks in: “Let’s go to the mall.”

Seef Mall, about a mile away, strikes me as – well, it’s a mall. A vast multi-level indoor air-conditioned mall as up-to-date as any in America, filled with name brands, screaming children and teenage girls – much to Najeeb’s distraction. At the Dairy Queen I have a falafel-burger and marvel at how far down the fast-food chain Bahrain reaches: there’s DQ and Burger King, but there’s also Cinnabon, Bennigan’s, Ponderosa Steakhouse, and even, weirdly, a Seattle’s Best Coffee. I’m a bit shell-shocked by the transition from centuries-old ceremony to 21st century commerce, but it’s soon clear we’re here mostly for Najeeb’s benefit. He ducks into a cosmetics store to flirt with the girl at the register. He has a “girlfriend,” whom he’ll most likely marry, he tells me, but she’s still a teenager and he sees her only about a half dozen times a year. He prefers the idea of love American-style. Despite his frustration, the impression I have is that he gets to try his hand at it often enough.

It’s getting late. The cousins suggest we take in a movie at the mall’s 16-plex. “Johnny Depp,” Najeeb nods approvingly at a Pirates of the Caribbean poster. But the last thing I want to do in Bahrain is sit through an American movie.

Not that an American movie is at all out of place here. The Gulf has its share of American restaurants, American products, American attitudes and ambition (while I am in Bahrain, Najeeb is head-hunted away to a new job after only two days at his old one) and American institutions like the mall, the gigaplex movie theater and the AC/DC t-shirt. Perhaps that’s part of the problem, but not everyone sees it that way.

On the ride back to my hotel, Backstreet Boys blaring from the Vitara’s speakers, I thank the cousins for showing me a slice of Islam I probably never would have found on my own. This sparks a discussion of “living the Muslim way,” which Moniem and Najeeb describe as a life in harmony with one’s fellows – something they find lacking in the Arab world. “Here is violence, discrimination, bad feeling between Shia and Sunni,” Najeeb says. Moniem agrees.

“Here we are not living the Muslim way,” Najeeb tells me. “Only in America do you find people living like true Muslims.”

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KYOTO, Japan — I’m on the Karasuma line of the Kyoto subway as Bush’s Iraq deadline passes, and I couldn’t feel further from the war. On either side of me, Japanese commuters are catching a last few minutes of sleep before they hit the office, and standing nearby is a beautiful young woman in kimono. This is the town for geisha, after all – though after checking around I realize she’s probably just a college student, dressed up for a night on the town to celebrate graduation. I’m a world away from home, from New York, Philadelphia, Baghdad, London. Bombs are falling, but in another time zone, far away.

Bombs almost fell here, in another era. Kyoto was on Harry Truman’s original A-bomb list in 1945, but was spared because of the city’s cultural history, which stretches back thousands of years. This is Japan’s garden city, the most beautiful spot in the country, filled with temples and cherry blossoms and the intricate history of samurai, shoguns and emperors. Once the country’s capital, it has also given rise to some of Japan’s greatest literature, and was the location for Akira Kurosawa’s oft-quoted film Rashomon. As the mellow recorded voice of the Japanese subway woman smoothly announces my stop, it is hard to picture the sandstorms sweeping Kuwait, let alone the firestorms that are about to sweep its neighbor to the northwest.

I’m on my way to cover an international gum-flap known as the 3rd World Water Forum, which has attracted thousands of people from all over the globe. They represent multilateral agencies, non-governmental organizations and corporations big and small, and they have come to discuss the world’s very real “water crisis”: 6,000 people die from water-related diseases every day; 1.1 billion people have insufficient access to safe drinking water; 2.4 billion have no sanitation facilities. You want mass destruction? Here it is.

Sadly, WWF3 is proving a bit of a bust. There are precious few concrete proposals for how to mobilize the funds it would take to give a billion people clean water, and those who control the cash – executives at big water companies like France’s Vivendi Environnement and Suez Ondeo, the UK’s Anglian Water, and Germany’s RWE (owner of Thames Water) – are met by protestors decrying the involvement of the private sector in such public works.

In fact, the four other gaijin on the subway car with me – otherwise known as “whiteys” in the parlance of a Japanese friend of mine – are among the hundreds of environmental lobbyists, indigenous peoples’ respresentatives and other water activists who have booths or press conferences or papers to hand out at the forum. I’ve seen them in the lobby of my hotel, taking up too many of the restaurant’s tables, munching corn flakes and talking about Bay Area real estate prices. Their hearts are in the right place – or near there, at any rate.

But on the subway, I notice something odd. All four of these staunch advocates of the thirsty guy are gripping America-sized paper to-go cups from which the aroma of fine espresso wafts.

And yes, the cups are from Starbucks.

The sight of four foot-stampers sucking on Starbucks cups is an enjoyable irony, but it’s somehow less delicious on this particular morning in Japan. After all, this is a country America bombed the shit out of half a century ago. It was here that we unleashed the first weapons of mass destruction the world had ever seen. No quick exit that time: we stayed to write a new constitution, gave the Japanese a crash course in representative democracy and market capitalism, and all but denied the country its right to bear arms. It’s not so much that we were afraid of what would happen if we didn’t refashion Japan in our own image. It’s just that, as a people, we tend to be small-minded. We don’t know how to rebuild a country any other way.

But the small-mindedness seems to work for us. On the subway I enjoy my laugh at the activists’ expense and then turn to the day-old newspaper I haven’t had time to read. There I see that despite the fact that more than three-quarters of the country opposes “the disarmament of Iraq,” as GWB so delicately described it that morning, Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi has trotted out his movie-star good looks to sign on for Bush’s war just hours before the first cruise missiles took off. It “wouldn’t be prudent,” as Papa Bush might have said, to do anything else, what with North Korea warming up its nukes nearby and Japan’s best defense being the 60,000 US troops that are stationed here. No one forced Koizumi to come on board. But somewhere along the line, America made his country an offer he couldn’t refuse.

In effect, the nationbuilding America did after World War Two made us into a kind of realpolitik Godfather, selling protection around the world for the same things Vito Corleone wanted: a measure of docility and a little tribute – only in our case tribute takes the form of a Starbucks-friendly economic system and a little lobbying of intransigent Security Council members.

It doesn’t always work, of course (viz., Germany, which is bucking the system by denying us its UN sway). But it’s a nice little trick America has for turning enemies into friends. If you do the reconstruction right, even a country you’ve atom-bombed can become a comfortable place to eat corn flakes and complain about the gentrification of your neighborhood back home.

And that’s when it hits me, staring at the cappuccinos, laughing silently to myself at the folly of these smug, cause-proud Americans who can’t be bothered to sample even as much of the culture as it would take to eat a Japanese breakfast: this is what we’re doing in Iraq. It isn’t about oil or religion or terrorism or policing the world or striking back. Yes, tangentially it’s about all those things. But politicians, and especially presidents – even ones like Dubya, who only holds the job as a stepping stone to becoming baseball commissioner – presidents think in longer terms than that. They’re like novelists: they work because they want to be remembered.

How much do you know about James Monroe’s presidency? Not much, probably, but you’ve heard of the Monroe Doctrine, which first set up America as a policeman outside its own borders. More to the point, though it wasn’t dreamt up by a president, same goes for the Marshall Plan. You think George Marshall cares that no one knows his first name? No way. There are three secrets to a successful political career: legacy, legacy and legacy.

George W. Bush’s legacy will be made not in this war but in the post-war rethink in which Bush and his friends and business associates sit down to refashion Iraq. It won’t be an easy job, but if he gets his reconstruction right, Bush’s legacy will be an American pied-a-terre in the Middle East – which would constitute nothing less than a huge, historic victory for the loosely connected shadow empire we maintain all over the world. We can drink the sweet aroma of Japan’s cherry blossoms, we can quaff German beer, sip Italian espresso. We can move anywhere we want in the developed world. But the Middle East is one of the few regions without a comfortable country where Americans can drift about blithely spending their money on American companies, free of any more fear of crime, suicide bombers or terrorist assault than they’re wracked with back home. It might take a couple of decades to bring about, but you know the president who sets the change in motion is going to be long remembered for his good works. Plus which, maybe then we could even jettison Israel, where our tactics haven’t worked out so well, you’ll have to admit.

Understand that I’m not talking clent-states. We don’t want to force anyone’s allegiance; we just want to make it really, really hard for them to do anything else. It’s moral suasion through infrastructure. We want to make Westernization into the path of least resistance. We want to give visiting protestors easy access to Starbucks. You think real estate prices in Oakland are bad? Wait till we gentrify your country.

If you think that’s not what we’re up to, look again at the news. Yes, we’re going to occupy the place and install a democractic government, but that’s just SOP. Most countries eventually find their way to some form of democracy and capitalism anyway. Far more interesting than the political edicts, though, will be the redevelopment contracts, which will go to big American businesses like Bechtel and any company Dick Cheney’s ever had anything to do with. Not even Tony Blair gets a piece of the action. We’re going to do things right.

Of course, we’ve first got to win the war. It could all be over by the time you read this. “Shock and awe” may just carry the day. Then again, Baghdad could become Stalingrad. For the Iraqis’ sake, we need a quick victory. Better to go in as a compassionate conqueror than as a bitter little general resentful at having had his fingers burned.

Saddam is not Stalin; he is not Hirohito; and he is not Hitler (though this is one of the few places that last comparison can even be made). He is crazy and evil and continues to do horrible things and he needs to be stopped, and for a variety of reasons war may be the best course of action right now, I don’t know. Bush may not be the best president for the job, but he’s the one we’ve got. If you don’t like it, vote more often in the next election.

Actually, Bush is an ass. No argument there. But I always thought he and his cronies were not quite the swiftest scuds in the silo. I thought they just wanted contracts for their friends, oil for their country, vengeance for their wounded pride. It took the Japanese subway to convince me otherwise. You’ve at least got to admire the guy for the range of his vision.

And it really is a brilliant vision that Bush and his handmaidens have of the world. What a great thing, if decades from now Baghdad could become the next Kyoto or Berlin and we could one day hold a big international conference there – on, say, water – and politicians could do a little sightseeing in between their pointless chin-wags and people could fly in from all over the world to protest the involvement of big business in social works while sipping from big business’s to-go cup.

It’s a totally brilliant plan, and you have to admire the people who came up with it. Not Bush and Cheney and the smoldering Condoleeza Rice, but you and me, very gradually, over the course of the last two and a quarter centuries. If you don’t agree, I’d be happy to discuss it with you over a cappuccino at Starbucks. Anywhere in the world.

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