Bloody insurgency and sectarian strife tear at the country of Iraq, but Iraqi Kurdistan—three northern “governorates’’ under the control of the Kurdistan Regional Government, with its own language, flag, and national anthem, its own Parliament and its own army—prospers relatively free of violence. The Kurdistan region is open for business. With the buzz of dealmaking and the ringing cell phones and the smell of oil literally in the air, you get a sense, sitting in the Atrium, of being caught up in this planet’s biggest game, of touching the skirts of power and intrigue and life-changing wealth. (Read more about what lies beyond the Iraqi oil boom.)

The Kurdistan region is Paul Wolfowitz’s wet dream: maybe not a beacon of democracy, but certainly a red-hot ember—peaceful, orderly, secular, democratic, wildly capitalist, and sentimentally pro-American—afloat on an ocean of oil.

Very well: We tend to overlook good news because it’s generally followed by bad news, and another month from my happy breakfast with Ward VanLerberg, Turkish bombers will run forays in this region’s empty northeast corner against the P.K.K., fugitive Kurd rebels who are at war with neighboring Turkey—little damage, but much booming. And before it gets better, the news will get even worse: by the end of January, the northern Iraqi city of Mosul will see plenty of violence, and U.S. commanders will declare it “Al Qaeda’s last urban stronghold.” Good news, bad news.

They call it “The Other Iraq,” and all of them—the Kurdish representative Qubad Talabany in Washington; Kurdish Regional Government president Masoud Barzani and his nephew, Prime Minister Nechirvan Barzani; head of Foreign Relations Falah Mustafa Bakir; oil minister Ashti Hawrami; the man in a shop who won’t accept money from Americans in exchange for a kilo of apricots—want the news out: This is what Cheney-Bush wanted. That’s the news from here. This is free enterprise blooming—not “booming,” our driver Hameed insists carefully—in the mountains and desert of northern Iraq.

Hameed is a mustachioed Kurd with a bandit’s face who presents himself each morning in well-pressed sports apparel and drives us around in his Land Cruiser, listening to Persian pop tunes on his tape deck. His business card identifies him as a freelance “fixer,’’ but he may also get a paycheck from the Ministry of Foreign Relations and may have some connection with Intelligence. Or maybe not. Susan Meiselas thinks he does. Susan is my photographer on this assignment. Usually I’m half-broke and deliriously off-course from the first day of these journalistic ventures, but this time I get an expense account and a world-class “shooter’’—that’s what I get to call her. I requested Susan specifically. My impression was that she’d seen a bit of Kurdistan and might know a few folks who could point us to a pipeline.

Our purpose in engaging fixer Hameed is to get us out to look at oil operations of one kind or another. Whichever way we go, we’ll find them.