And the Kurds love Americans. Love, love. Investors swarm in from all over the globe, and foreigners are common in Erbil, but if you mention tentatively and apologetically that you’re American, a shopkeeper or café owner is likely to take you aside and grip your arm and address you with the passionate sincerity of a drunken uncle: “I speak not just for me but all of Kurdish people. Please bring your United States Army here forever. You are welcome, welcome. No, I will not accept your money today, please take these goods as my gift to America.”

On Monday, we talk to business folks and some of the government’s innumerable ministers. (Actually, the ministers number 43, and five of them are women.) The Kurdish Regional Government is secular, and neither the Kurdish Democratic Party nor its counterpart, the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, pledge formal allegiance to Islam. The Kurds themselves are overwhelmingly Muslim, however. Younger Kurdish women dress like Europeans, but in smaller towns they retain their scarves, often only covering their shoulders, but also handy for ducking under when a bare head might seem disrespectful to the Prophet. At Erbil’s public recreation center, women use the pool at separate hours from men, and unmarried females have nowhere to go to amuse themselves, but that’s only until a private 90,000-square-foot women’s center that’s now under construction opens with its steam bath, Turkish bath, aerobics room, yoga room, workout room, and internet center.

At Zagros TV, one of Erbil’s five television stations, a news producer tells us that he’s free to be critical, but only of the government. “If we stray too far politically, we get a phone call. If we decided to criticize the Prophet Muhammad, we’d get a rocket through the roof.”

The Board of Investment offers free lots to investors who are ready to build for their businesses. Get it while you can. “I offer it now,’’ says Herish Muhamad, the board chairman, “but in a while, no more.’’

Twenty miles from town stands a power plant that’s expected to be sending 500 megawatts to Erbil by early spring. The project’s assistant director, Dliwer Arif, stands atop a 4.5-million-liter diesel tank, 55 feet in the air, and looks over the generators and turbines. A year ago, this was empty desert. Dliwer smiles with one tooth missing and says, “Yes. Because we are in a hurry. All of Kurdistan is in a hurry.’’ The diesel tank is being tested for leaks, the whole thing trembling. Susan points her camera over the 20 acres of buildings and men and machines, I embrace the railing, and Dliwer tests his cell phone. He’s very impressed with the reception this high up.

On Tuesday, we head southeast to the town of Taq Taq to watch men grinding and welding 10-meter-deep tanks for Topco, a Turkish oil company, at a field from which they expect to pump 70,000 barrels a day. Afterward, we drive three miles to the site of a future refining facility owned by the Kurdish government and a British oil concern: a stretch of ground leveled and graded in the midst of a vast natural expanse, with a handful of guards who live in trailers and keep it safe and who don’t know who the hell these Land Cruising visitors are supposed to be.