Last week, George and his entourage landed in Vienna for a brief yearly confab with European Union leaders on a continent that views him with ever increasing alarm and hostility. According to the latest Pew poll, for instance, two-thirds of Austrians now have a negative view of the U.S. (even though Desperate Housewives is the TV hit of the year there). "A Harris Interactive/Financial Times survey released Monday found that 36 percent of Europeans view the United States as the world's greatest threat to 'global stability.' By comparison, 30 percent of those polled named Iran as the biggest threat, while 18 percent named China." When a European reporter actually confronted Bush with this at a press conference, it angered the President greatly and he responded not only with irritation, but with a Green Zone-style description of our American world: "We're a transparent democracy," he insisted. "People know exactly what's on our mind. We debate things in the open. We've got a legislative process that's active."

Here, then, is a description of Vienna as he entered it by Charles Bremner, a British reporter who has covered summits all the way back to Jimmy Carter's administration and finds the present security arrangements to have reached "absurd proportions." He writes:

"The centre of Vienna has been locked down since Bush's arrival on Air Force One last night. Streets are closed to traffic and parks and squares are locked shut. Bomb disposal squads are checking suitcases. The unusual quiet makes it feel like a prettier version of Soviet Moscow on the morning of the old November parades. Military helicopters are hovering over the Hofburg, the old Imperial Palace… We are working alongside in the usual vast press centre inside a cordon of about 2,000 police. To enter means penetrating three cordons, with the right credentials. At two of them, they searched all my bags and asked me to show that my computer and mobile phone were real. Dogs then sniffed them, along with the laundry in my overnight bag."

Oh, and while humanity is cleared from the general area, the dogs are usually flown in from the U.S. along with snipers, hordes of security personal, a bevy of escort cars, masses of aides, even cooks.

Two weeks earlier, the President made his secret escape from Washington and flew into Baghdad international airport wearing 25 pounds of body armor, helicoptered into the capital's heavily fortified American-controlled Green Zone, met with the new Iraqi prime minister (on five-minute's notice -- lest word get out and something terrible happen), dramatically looked him "in the eyes," and a few hours later left the U.S. version of "Iraq" for the administration's stage-set version of Washington to offer the American people yet another round of Green-Zone tales of turning tides, progress, and future Iraqi successes.

Incident in the Red Zone: But what about anyone who has to leave Baghdad's Green Zone for even a brief visit to the region the Americans on the spot call the "Red Zone" and most of the rest of us think of as Iraq? Well, the Australian ambassador had an interesting experience along these lines lately. As it happens, not all Iraqi ministries are located inside the Green Zone. The Ministry of Trade is unlucky in this regard, being in one of Baghdad's many embattled neighborhoods, which made the Australian ambassador no less unlucky. Last week, he had to visit Abdul-Falah al-Sudani, the Iraqi trade minister, in hopes of negotiating a multimillion dollar deal for Australian wheat. Naturally, he took along his "security guards." (Who in Baghdad would go anywhere without them?) In the ministry's parking lot they evidently ran into a set of armed Iraqis -- the trade minister's bodyguards, as it turned out -- and evidently fearing themselves in danger, simply opened fire, killing one and wounding several. They then seem to have leapt into their vehicles and hightailed it back to the safety of the Green Zone (apologies to follow later). Amid security guards, bodyguards, militias, insurgents, armed criminals of all sorts, private mercenaries, jihadis, and armed, terrified citizens, shoot on sight is increasingly the operative phrase. Call it the Wild East or maybe the world that George made.

Life between the Zones: While George and Karl and Dick and Don and Condi and Zalmay -- "Zarqawi's death will not by itself end the violence in Iraq. But [it] is an important step in the right direction. It is a good omen for Iraq, for Prime Minister Maliki's new government, and our overall efforts in the Global War on Terror..." -- were spinning a cotton-candy confection out of post-Zarqawi, don't-cut-and-run Iraq, our Green-Zone ambassador, the very same Zalmay Khalilzad, sent a cable marked "sensitive" to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice that just happened to end up in the hands of the Washington Post. All the Post would say was that it was "obtained" by the paper -- though assumedly it was leaked by someone, Iraqi or American, who wanted the world to know what life in Iraq was actually like, even for those working in the Green Zone.