Today’s New York Times offers not one but two stories about oil and power. The first, on the front page, delves into Iran and the ways the Revolutionary Guards have become, as the article says, “a vast military-based conglomerate” with a multi-billion dollar business empire centered around construction, oil and gas. Over in Venezuela, Hugo Chavez’s family exerts an unusual amount of control in the state of Barinas, where the president’s eldest brother is the governor (the previous governor was his father) and another brother is a mayor and yet another sibling is a banker who does business with the state. The story notes that Baranas, reflecting the high levels of violent crime in Venezuela, has a kidnapping rate that is higher than Mexico’s or Colombia’s. One of the offshoots of oil booms in countries like Iran and Venezuela is that while incomes might rise, democracy and transparency can decline.

I understand the risk of over-saturating this blog with PR for my new book ... but I can’t resist. What follows are a few words of praise that will appear on the dust cover of Crude World when it comes out in September. A word to the wise: if you click the link on Robert Redford’s name you will be taken to one of the all-time best movie scenes about oil and politics.

“Peter Maass takes a fascinating, nightmarish journey to the far end of the pipeline. If you want to know the true cost of America’s oil addiction–and if even you don’t–you should read this book.” -Elizabeth Kolbert

“With the clarity of a hard-boiled investigator and the grace of a fine writer, Peter Maass reveals how oil has cursed the countries that possess it, corrupted those who want it, and wrought havoc on a world addicted to it. Brilliant and compelling.” -Robert B. Reich

“Crude World gets its energy from Peter Maass’s exhaustive investigation and first-hand experience and results in an illuminating narrative of the true impact of the global dependence on oil. His engaging historic perspective brings clarity to what should come next.  This book is essential reading for these times and for anyone interested in making the right decisions about our energy future.” -Robert Redford

“Getting off oil is a great idea for a lot of reasons, like saving the planet’s climate. But Peter Maass gives us another set of bonuses. If you think drug dealing is a dirty business, then meet the biggest drug of all.” -Bill McKibben

 

Just a quick note to mention that my new book, Crude World: The Violent Twilight of Oil, will be published in September. The early reviews are encouraging. Publishers Weekly says Crude World is “heartfelt and beautifully crafted.” Kirkus describes it as “breathless, alarming evidence of the harm that oil inflicts on the world.” Knopf (okay, Knopf is my publisher, so this is akin to quoting my mother) calls Crude World “a stunning and revealing examination of oil’s indelible impact on the countries that produce it and the people who possess it.” Knopf has posted more info here and the link for pre-orders on Amazon is here. The book’s minimalist cover, adjacent to this post, can be enlarged if you click it. I plan to blog more frequently in the coming months, and my website will be redesigned before the end of summer, so please stay tuned!

In the summer of 1992 a young Bosnian doctor was infiltrated into Srebrenica, a desperate enclave that was besieged by Serb troops. Nedret Mujkanovic served as Srebrenica’s only surgeon, working in 19th-century conditions because the enclave had little medicine or medical equipment; he often operated by flashlight. When he returned to Tuzla the next year he was hailed as a humanitarian hero; I wrote a story about him at the time. After the war, Nedret was elected to Bosnia’s parliament (in 1998 I wrote another story that included a few paragraphs on him) but his true home was in the medical world, so he eventually returned to full-time medicine. He was a phenomenal individual. A few days ago I heard the sad news that Nedret had died in Tuzla. There will not be another man like him.

If you read the New York Times’ coverage of Iraq and Afghanistan in recent years you would have noticed the remarkable work of Dexter Filkins, one of the best war correspondents of our times. Dexter has written an amazing book about his experiences, “The Forever War,” and next week I’m introducing a lecture he’s delivering at Princeton University, where I’m teaching this semester. Dexter is an unusually vibrant speaker, so if you’re in the neighborhood, please stop by. The talk is at McCosh 10 from 4:30-6:00 pm on Nov. 12, and Dexter will sign books afterwards.

In the debate about Iraq, it has become a convention in hawkish American circles to blame the Bush administration for bad execution of a good idea (i.e. invading a large Middle Eastern nation). “Generation Kill,” a powerful new HBO miniseries, offers a reality-based counter-narrative that shows how the American military had more than enough built-in deficiencies to undermine even a well-planned conquest. Bad execution and bad idea. I wrote a review of the series for Slate.

If you’re thinking “Robert Mugabe,” you may be wrong. How about Teodoro Obiang? I wrote a short piece about him for Slate.

In November I will be a Regents Lecturer at UC Berkeley, which means, among other things, that I will give several talks. Come one, come all!

Oct. 29: “The Amazon v. Big Oil: In Ecuador, Chevron Faces Judgment Day.” 4-5:15 pm. 101 Morgan Hall.

Nov. 1: “From Saddam to Muqtada: A Writer’s Odyssey Through Wartime Iraq.” 5-7 pm. Wurster Auditorium.

Nov. 7: “In the Shadow of Armies: From Iraq to Bosnia, the Tactics and Perils of Reporting on War Crimes.” 4-6 pm. North Gate Library.

For details about these lectures, click here.

Back in 1996, Vanity Fair published a lengthy excerpt from my book, “Love Thy Neighbor.” I never received an electronic copy of the excerpt, so it wasn’t posted on this site (or anywhere on the web). In the past few months I received a number of enquiries about the excerpt, because it was mentioned in a best-selling book, “Freedom Writers,” that was made into a movie starring Hilary Swank. I dug around and finally found an electronic version of the excerpt. With a very small drum roll, here it is.

In a ramshackle courthouse in Lago Agrio, an oil town in Ecuador, a precedent-setting lawsuit is nearing its end after more than a decade. Who is to blame for the environmental mess that was triggered by the discovery of oil in the 1960s? The plaintiffs, who live in the region, are seeking billions of dollars from Chevron. Click here for my story, which is in the March issue of Outside.

My latest essay, about the connection between North Korea’s nuclear weapons and nationalism on the Korean peninsula, is in this weekend’s issue of The New York Times Magazine. Click here or here.

The Los Angeles Times publishes a sad and evocative story (registration required) by one of its Iraqi reporters, who writes about day-to-day life in his neighborhood. Now, not only do neighbors no longer trust each other, they are too fearful to help someone who has been shot. The reporter—who the Times does not name, due to security concerns—was shopping for groceries when he heard a few shots of gunfire. He explains what happened next: “I saw a man lying on the ground in a small pool of blood. He wasn’t dead. The idea of stopping to help or to take him to a hospital crossed my mind, but I didn’t dare. Cars passed without stopping. Pedestrians and shop owners kept doing what they were doing, pretending nothing had happened. I was still looking at the wounded man and blaming myself for not stopping to help. Other shoppers peered at him from a distance, sorrowful and compassionate, but did nothing. I went on to another grocery store, staying for about five minutes while shopping for tomatoes, onions and other vegetables. During that time, the man managed to sit up and wave to passing cars. No one stopped. Then, a white Volkswagen pulled up. A passenger stepped out with a gun, walked steadily to the wounded man and shot him three times. The car took off down a side road and vanished. No one did anything. No one lifted a finger. The only reaction came from a woman in the grocery store. In a low voice, she said, “My God, bless his soul.” I went home and didn’t dare tell my wife. I did not want to frighten her.”

Donald Rumsfeld, when asked about the looting that followed the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, memorably replied that “stuff happens.” Three years later, stuff is still happening. Salam Pax, in his resuscitated but occasional blog (he posts only slightly more frequently than I do), has a useful entry about a man whose father was rushed to a hospital after being shot in a taxi:

Ahmad gets a phone call and leaves work to go check on his injured father. Shula is a Shia district and although it has seen its share of violence it was never as mad as neighbouring Ameriyah, so he wasn’t that worried about going there. When he gets there he finds out that his father will survive and other than the injury he doesn’t have much to worry about. He walks out of the hospital and before he gets to his car he is bundled up and kidnapped. A couple of hours later his body is found, decapitated. His head in a plastic bag near the body and no explanation.

Salam also mentions that a friend of his family was robbed at home. When one of the robbers found the homeowner’s passport, he was surprised and inquired, “Can you tell me what you are still doing here?” Salam writes, “I ask myself the same question almost every day. And clearly answering ‘this is home’ really isn’t cutting it anymore.” Click here for more.

Last year, I was embedded with the U.S. military in Samarra and wrote a cover story about the rather dismal situation there, with Iraqi and American forces fighting what seemed to be a dirty war. In a riveting story, Tom Lasseter of Knight Ridder writes about the current state of things in Samarra, where American troops strap dead insurgents to the hoods of their Humvees, and an American soldier, after killing an apparently innocent Iraqi, cannot contain his frustration, telling Lasseter, “No one told me why I’m putting my life on the line in Samarra, and you know why they didn’t? Because there is no f———reason.” If Samarra is a window into the war-fighting part of the counter-insurgency campaign, it’s only gotten worse in the past year.

As environmentalists in America battle to preserve a drilling ban in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, sensitive eco-systems in foreign countries are being drilled to provide oil for America. Is there a double standard at work, in which America outsources to less-fortunate countries the drawbacks of resource extraction? My essay in this weekend’s New York Times Magazine explores this issue.

Can Saudi Arabia continue to supply the world with as much oil as it needs? I recently travelled to Saudi Arabia to find out whether a problem is on the horizon. The article I wrote, The Breaking Point, is the cover story of this week’s New York Times Magazine. “The largest oil terminal in the world, Ras Tanura, is located on the eastern coast of Saudi Arabia, along the Persian Gulf,” the story begins. “From Ras Tanura’s control tower, you can see the classic totems of oil’s dominion — supertankers coming and going, row upon row of storage tanks and miles and miles of pipes. Ras Tanura, which I visited in June, is the funnel through which nearly 10 percent of the world’s daily supply of petroleum flows. Standing in the control tower, you are surrounded by more than 50 million barrels of oil, yet not a drop can be seen. The oil is there, of course. In a technological sleight of hand, oil can be extracted from the deserts of Arabia, processed to get rid of water and gas, sent through pipelines to a terminal on the gulf, loaded onto a supertanker and shipped to a port thousands of miles away, then run through a refinery and poured into a tanker truck that delivers it to a suburban gas station, where it is pumped into an S.U.V. — all without anyone’s actually glimpsing the stuff. So long as there is enough oil to fuel the global economy, it is not only out of sight but also out of mind, at least for consumers. I visited Ras Tanura because oil is no longer out of mind…”

No, not Paul Theroux, but his brother, Peter, who wrote an insightful and delightful book, Sandstorms, about his sojourn in Saudi Arabia during the 1980s. I happened to come across it while visiting the desert kingdom for an upcoming story.  “Sandstorms” was published in 1990 and appears to have been nearly forgotten (current Amazon rank: 1,232,321), and that’s a pity.

My latest story, the cover piece of this weekend’s New York Times Magazine, focuses on the Special Police Commandos in Iraq. They are the Iraqi government’s most elite counter-insurgency force, effective and brutal at their job. Many of them are Sunni, and many of them were in Saddam Hussein’s Republican Guards. Now they are America’s best hope for defeating the insurgency.

This post is proof that this blog is not extinct (yet). For a textured look at the life of Muslim immigrants (legal and illegal) who get caught up in an FBI terrorism investigation, check out ““Harbor” by Lorraine Adams. An unusual and timely novel.

Gilles Kepel’s ideas about the Middle East have always intrigued me, and David Ignatius, in today’s Washington Post, writes an opinion piece about Kepel’s newest book. The opinion piece is worth reading and, I imagine, so is Kepel’s book, The War for Muslim Minds: Islam and the West.