The German landscape -- green as the terrain surrounding a model train

Fully awake for a change, I zipped through the German countryside on my way to Austria. I spent hours staring out the window, lost in the infinite greenness of forests, fields and mountains. Germans maintain their country like the terrain of a model train set.

Upon arriving in Vienna, I checked into a youth hostel downtown and went searching for a kebab place -- only Turks seemed to keep their restaurants open past midnight here. I found myself on Mariahilfer Strasse, or Hail Mary Street. Despite its name, it's not so much a religious center as a legendary shopping area. Legendary for Hungarians at least: This was where my compatriots flocked to buy their first VCRs, CD players and freezers in the late 1980s, when Hungarians were more or less free to go places, but couldn't get any of those products at home. These merchants made a killing on us back then, I thought.

The next morning I went to see Ken Brockman, a senior official at the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the United Nation's nuclear watchdog.

Ken Brockman in front of his U.S. Constitution, decorated with Native American tribesmen

Brockman's ancestors were Germans, but he was born in Louisville, Kentucky -- what he calls "a heartland of America type of place." He graduated from West Point and in the 1970s served in the U.S. Army in Germany, patrolling the border between East and West, and occasionally guarding the Czech frontier as well.

"If they saw something suspicious, their prefab guard towers went up in three days," he said of the Czechs. "But we did trade cigarettes with them occasionally."

After demobilization, "Ken and his VW Beetle took off for 35 days to do Europe," Brockman recalled. That was when he saw Vienna for the first time. He would be back some 25 years later, as chief of Nuclear Reactor Safety at the IAEA. He was to start in March 2003, just as the United Nation's nuclear inspectors were doing their final pre-invasion laps in Iraq.

Youngsters hanging out in the Vienna Palace gardens

"My friends were telling me, 'What are you, crazy?'" he said. "'You want to be a target?'"

Mainly responsible for reactor safety, he wasn't among the inspectors sent to the Middle East, but his experience in Vienna sheds some light on why the IAEA had to walk away from Iraq empty-handed, with the job half-finished. Americans, he said, tend to want things yesterday -- an attitude hardly workable in the Muslim world.

"To Americans, there's no time like the present," he said. "That got a lot worse after someone came and smacked us in the face on 9/11. We have a very short fuse now." But nuclear diplomacy doesn't work with jittery negotiators. "No wonder Europeans have had much more success trying to stop Iran's nuclear program," he added. Brockman, whose office is decorated with a version of the U.S. Constitution adorned by Native Americans, had a lot of explaining to do in Vienna about his government's actions in the Middle East.

The Museum Quarter also offers places to chill out

"I still believe they [the Bush administration] did what they did based on information; they just haven't shared it with us," he said. "Of course, Western Europeans are upset about that, much more so than Eastern Europeans. America never acknowledged alternatives to its course of action."

But for Europeans, he said, Iraq was just a backdrop for much more important things. In terms of its Union, Europe is where the United States was in the 18th century. The old nationalistic model was by now mostly a thing of the past, and most nations were trying to figure out how they could make their new unit, the European Union, work.

The U.N. center in Vienna's Diplomatic District

"Historically, as the U.S. came together, each state was very unique for a long time," he said. "It took us a civil war to figure out what we were going to do. Some of the challenges, some of the dilemmas are the same in Europe today. ... It's amazing how many things I can correlate back to the U.S. and say, 'Been there, done that.'"

Brussels, the European capital, is on the right track, he said. The bureaucracy is a little oversized, the European military is a bit too small, but there are amazing improvements -- like the three-year-old single currency, the euro, which "to me is the best thing in the world."

Indeed, I thought, as I left the glitzy U.N. skyscraper and bought a subway ticket downtown for 1.50 euros.

Soon, the 10 new E.U. members, most of which are from the old Soviet bloc, will also share the common currency. That's a sure sign of arrival in a unified Europe, where we can go shopping anywhere, but we don't have to go far if we don't want to. I grabbed my bags at the hostel, went back to the train station and settled into the Orient Express. The last train still calling itself that would now take me all the way to Paris.

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