This is the startling portrait of an Oz-like place where a vital aspect of our government's folly in Iraq played out. The Washington Post's former Baghdad bureau chief, Raviv Chandrasekaran, takes us with him into the Zone, into a bubble, cut off from wartime realities, where the task of reconstructing a devastated nation competed with the distractions of a Little America. A half-dozen bars stocked with cold beer, a disco where women showed up in hot pants, and a parking lot filled with shiny new SUV's, much of it run by Halliburton. Most Iraqis were barred from entering the Emerald City for fear they would blow it up

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