July 18, 2008
 
What "Generation Kill" Gets Right About Iraq
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.
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June 25, 2008
 
Who's Africa's Worst Dictator?
If you're thinking "Robert Mugabe," you may be wrong. How about Teodoro Obiang? I wrote a short piece about him for Slate.
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December 22, 2007
 
Law v. Oil
The saga of James Giffen is fascinating. Giffen was indicted by American prosecutors in 2003 for allegedly making more than $78 million in bribes in oil-rich Kazakhstan. One of his alleged partners-in-bribery was Nursultan Nazarbayev, the Kazakh president who is an unindicted co-conspirator in the case. While Nazarbayev continues to be treated by the American government as a distinguished VIP, Giffen could spend the rest of his life in jail. His lawyers have mounted an unusual defense, arguing that their client was a CIA operative whose activities were approved by the agency. I've written a short article for the New York Times that delves into what the case says about oil, corruption and the rule of law in America.
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September 21, 2007
 
Berkeley Lectures
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.
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April 8, 2007
 
"Bosnia's Ground Zero" in Vanity Fair
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.
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March 7, 2007
 
Ecuador's 18-Billion-Gallon Valdez
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.
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October 22, 2006
 
Radioactive Nationalism in Korea
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.
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September 21, 2006
 
Another Day in Baghdad
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."
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May 16, 2006
 
Stuff Still Happens
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.
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February 17, 2006
 
Samarra, a Year Later
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.
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December 18, 2005
 
The Price of Oil
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.
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August 25, 2005
 
The Breaking Point
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..."
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August 8, 2005
 
Theroux in Arabia
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.
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May 1, 2005
 
The Way of the Commandos
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.
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January 25, 2005
 
A Good Book
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.
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September 28, 2004
 
Mind Wars
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.
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August 20, 2004
 
Bosnia, Exhumed
Courtney Angela Brkic went to Bosnia to exhume mass graves but found much more than skeletons. My review of her book, "The Stone Fields," was published in the Los Angeles Times Book Review; a copy is posted here.
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August 3, 2004
 
The Quiet Tycoon
What is life like for a man who is worth $4 billion and controls as much oil as ExxonMobil? My profile of Vagit Alekperov, the president of Lukoil, is the cover story of this week’s New York Times Magazine. The article looks at the new rules of the game for oligarchs in Putin's Russia and explores why Alekperov is doing well while his rival, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, has been in jail since October.
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May 6, 2004
 
A Bad Barrel
If you want to understand how the abuses occurred at Abu Ghraib, the best explanation is contained in a story in today’s New York Times. The story recounts a 1971 experiment at Stanford University in which 24 students were randomly assigned to be either prison guards or prisoners. The story notes that “within days, the ‘guards’ had become swaggering and sadistic, to the point of placing bags over the prisoners’ heads, forcing them to strip naked and encouraging them to perform sexual acts.” Although the experiment was scheduled to last for two weeks, it was ended after just a week, because of the ‘guards’ remarkable sadism. Dr. Philip G. Zimbardo, a leader of the experiment, is quoted in the story as saying he was not surprised by what happened at Abu Ghraib. “I have exact, parallel pictures of prisoners with bags over their heads,” he said. “It’s not that we put bad apples in a good barrel. We put good apples in a bad barrel. The barrel corrupts anything it touches.” The only way to prevent such behavior is to have strong discipline from commanders, and this was absent at Abu Ghraib.
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May 3, 2004
 
The Things We Carry
Gizmodo, the tech website, wanted to know what gadgets journalists carry in warzones. Here's my answer.
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February 12, 2004
 
Watching North Korea
For anyone interested in updates on North Korea, a CNN journalist, Rebecca Mackinnon, has started a new website, NKzone, which tracks developments there and includes a useful variety of links and discussions.
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January 19, 2004
 
Over Iraq, the Army Takes on the Marines
In today’s Washington Post, an Army lieutenant colonel writes a lengthy opinion piece criticizing an embryonic Marine policy to use a “velvet gloves” approach in the Sunni Triangle, in contrast to the often hard-nosed tactics used by the Army. Gian P. Gentile was the executive officer of the 1st Brigade Combat Team, based in Tikrit until recently. After relieving a Marine unit, soldiers of his battalion engaged and killed a number of Iraqis looting weapons from a warehouse. Gentile asks, “Was this approach ‘hard’ compared with that of the Marines? Yes. In this case, did it stop the looting and even the potential of remote-controlled mines and rocket-propelled grenades getting into the hands of terrorists trying to kill Americans? Absolutely. Had these kinds of activities by Iraqi terrorists been going on in Tikrit while the Marines were applying their velvet glove? Undoubtedly.”

The Marines are returning to Iraq in the coming months and, in their formulation of a new approach, they are implicitly criticizing the Army’s tactics. The debate has broken into the open and is of more than academic interest; to a great extent, the tactics used by the U.S. military will determine whether the insurgency will spread or be crushed. Last month, in an opinion piece in The New York Times, Lt. Col. Carl E. Mundy III, who commanded a Marine battalion in Iraq, wrote that “in the spirit of reconciliation, this may be a good time to hold back the iron hammer and extend our velvet glove…for every reported military success there are also reports of Sunni Iraqis who are angered by tactics like knocking down doors of houses and shops, demolishing buildings, flattening fruit groves, firing artillery in civilian neighborhoods and isolating large segments of the population with barbed wire fences….The ‘get tough’ approach resembles tactics used by Israelis in the occupied territories.” His conclusion was straightforward: “Now is the time to dangle more of the carrot and apply less of the stick in the Sunni region… By shifting to more of a velvet glove approach, the long hard slog may be a lot less painful.”

Either way, as Mundy notes, it will indeed be a long hard slog.
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January 12, 2004
 
The Counterinsurgent
John Nagl was a Rhodes scholar at Oxford University who wrote his PhD thesis about counter-insurgency. He read every classic book on the issue, his favorite being T.E. Lawrence's "Seven Pillars of Wisdom," which warns that fighting a guerrilla war is "messy and slow, like eating soup with a knife." But Nagl is not just a scholar of counter-insurgency. He is a major in the U.S. Army and is currently third-in-command of a tank battalion in the Sunni Triangle in Iraq. My profile of him is in this week's issue of The New York Times Magazine.

UPDATE. If you have too much time on your hands, you can listen to me talk about Iraq and counterinsurgency on the following programs:
--Fresh Air.
--Leonard Lopate. (Scroll to "Peter Maass.")
--NPR Weekend Edition. (Scroll to "U.S. Counterinsurgency Expert.")
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January 3, 2004
 
The Wars in Photos
If you want to be stunned by war photography, and in the process reach a deeper understanding of what war means and does, the VII photo agency has just published an amazing book. It's entitled War: USA - Afghanistan - Iraq, and it features the work of VII's photographers, a who's-who of their profession: James Nachtwey, Christopher Anderson, Gary Knight, Antonin Kratochvil, Ron Haviv, Christopher Morris, John Stanmeyer, Alexandra Boulat and Lauren Greenfield. "War" includes essays by David Rieff, Remy Ourdan and me, but the book is about images, not words.

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December 20, 2003
 
North Korea to Iraq
My latest stories include a political piece about North Korea, in The New Republic, as well as two brief stories in the Ideas issue of The New York Times Magazine.
--North Korea
--Project Eyes
--Thunder Run
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November 21, 2003
 
Post-Modern War Reporting
The lead of today's story in The Washington Post refers to "rocket-launcher-equipped donkey carts" that were used to attack the Palestine and Sheraton hotels in Baghdad. The story describes it as a "donkey-cart offensive" and notes that one of the carts carried a makeshift bomb built from cooking gas cylinders, which Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt calls a "donkey bomb."

"Troops returned fire," the story continues, "apparently injuring a donkey at the Sheraton and shaking up others. The donkeys were 'shaken not stirred,' Kimmitt said. 'They are alive but one is quite frankly pretty shook up' . . . Asked about the status of donkeys, Col. William Darley, another Army spokesman, said that while they are not 'enemy combatants,' they are 'deemed to have been co-opted to perform the will of the terrorist elements.'"

Not even The Onion can make up stuff like this.
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November 1, 2003
 
My Famous Interpreters, Cont.
Earlier this year, I happened to learn, belatedly, that my Baghdad interpreter, Salam Pax, was famous. This weekend's issue of The New York Times Magazine brings 15 minutes of fame to another of my interpreters--Minka Baros, who worked with me during the Bosnian war. Minka and her husband, Igor, are featured in the What They Were Thinking section of the magazine. (I was not involved in their selection.) Minka and Igor are photographed while golfing in Sarajevo. As Minka explains, "This is the only golf course in Sarajevo, and it's not even half of one. It has been open for two years, with just the four holes. We make it 18 holes by doing four and a half rounds." I think, however, that there's something wrong with the picture. Shouldn't I be the one enjoying life at the 18th hole?


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October 22, 2003
 
The U.S. Committee for Human Rights in North Korea has just released a devastating report that includes satellite images of prison camps in which several hundred thousand North Koreans are held. As Anne Applebaum, who's just published a book on the Soviet gulag, writes in today's Washington Post, "If any of the democratic participants--the United States, South Korea, Japan--were to absorb fully the information the images convey, the knowledge would make it impossible for that country to conduct any policy toward North Korea that did not make regime change its central tenet."

One of the people trying to bring these abuses to light is Norbert Vollertsen, a German doctor who worked in North Korea, which eventually expelled him, and now he organizes protests while travelling around the world trying to raise awareness of abuses there. JoongAng Ilbo, in an intriguing profile, describes Vollertsen as the Philip Berrigan of our age, which sounds right.



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October 19, 2003
 
The Last Emperor
Who is Kim Jong-il? A few months ago my editors at The New York Times Magazine asked me to find out, and the result is the cover story of this weekend's issue. The story is also posted here.

"The Dear Leader is a workaholic," it begins. "Kim Jong Il sleeps four hours a night, or if he works through the night, as he sometimes does, he sleeps four hours a day. His office is a hive of activity; reports cross his desk at all hours. Dressed as always in his signature khaki jumpsuit, he reads them all, issuing instructions to aides, dashing off handwritten notes or picking up the phone at 3 a.m. and telling subordinates what should lead the news broadcasts or whom to dispatch to a prison camp. His micromanaging style is less Caligula, with whom he has often been compared, and more Jimmy Carter on an authoritarian tear."

There are many useful websites about North Korea. This blog is maintained by an American who teaches English in Kwangju, South Korea; it's frequently updated with recent stories and commentary about events on the Korean peninsula. Human rights activists have a Free North Korea blog that tracks news stories about Kim Jong-il's regime. And if you want to hear the news from Pyongyang's viewpoint, North Korea's news agency posts its stories, in English. Lastly, National Public Radio and its affiliate in Boston have posted their interviews with me.
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September 17, 2003
 
The First Casualty
John Burns is getting a lot of attention for his comments in a new book about media coverage of the war in Iraq. Burns notes that some journalists pulled their punches in Baghdad so that they would not be expelled by Saddam Hussein's regime. Here's the money graph:

In one case, a correspondent actually went to the Internet Center at the Al-Rashid Hotel and printed out copies of his and other people's stories -- mine included -- specifically in order to be able to show the difference between himself and the others. He wanted to show what a good boy he was compared to this enemy of the state. He was with a major American newspaper.

Burns is right to single out a journalist who went far over the edge in kowtowing to a bloody regime, but I'm not sure Burns intends to say, as some people suggest, that most journalists were guilty of these practices. I wasn't in Baghdad during the war--I was moving toward the capital, as a "unilateral" journalist leapfrogging from one Marine unit to another--and most of the journalists I came across were doing what they could to write as much of the truth as they could find. But there are always bad apples, and as I was travelling north with several colleagues, I ran into one of them and wrote about it in a story for Outside magazine. The money graphs:

Chuck Stevenson, a producer for the CBS program 48 Hours Investigates who was embedded with one of the units preparing to cross the bridge, saw us parked at the side of the road. "These guys are not embedded," I heard him say to an officer. "They're not supposed to be here." Stevenson then headed up toward the checkpoint commander and, on his way back, got into a heated discussion with my colleagues.

This was beyond annoying; it could be dangerous. The military had clarified its position on unilateral journalists, and we were allowed to stay. But the situation was fluid, and individual commanders had a lot of leeway. If we had to go back, we'd be traveling alone--there were no convoys heading all the way back to Kuwait. We huddled and agreed that Stevenson was a snitch.

Enrico was furious. "This guy is fucking us," he said. "Let's take care of him now."

In view of Enrico's previous hobbies, this was a credible threat. Wes was equally outraged.

"Let's fuck him up right now," Wes urged. "He's going to get us killed."

Enrico and Wes moved in Stevenson's direction. Gary stepped in their way.

"Enrico, I'm getting mad," Gary said. "And you don't want me to get mad, because when I hit you, you stay down."

"But this guy is an asshole," Enrico pleaded. "He puts our lives at risk. You are too polite, Gary."

"We have a situation that we have to deal with," Gary replied. "Let's not make it worse. We need to get across the bridge, and that will never happen if we deck the guy."

Wes came around. "We'll get him in Baghdad," he said.

"Absolutely," Gary said. "After you get him, I'll finish him off."

(Later, Stevenson acknowledged that "a hostile moment" took place, but denied that it happened at the bridgehead, or that he told any officer that our presence was unauthorized.)

Stevenson's convoy was waved forward. We were finally allowed to move forward in darkness, without our lights, at 3 a.m.
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August 21, 2003
 
From Baghdad to Beirut
I’d like to promise that this is the last time I’ll mention the musings of Salam Pax, but I can’t be sure of that, because his insights into what’s happening in Iraq are just too damn good. From his blog today: "Maybe we Iraqis did expect too much from the American invasion, we did hope there is going to be an easy way. Get rid of Saddam and have the Americans help us rebuild. I don't think like that anymore. I am starting to believe that the chaos we will go thru the next 5 or 10 years is part of the price we will *have* to pay to have our freedom. This Beirut-ification is the way to learn how we should live as a free country and respect each other; it is just too painful to admit. It is too painful to have to admit that the [burn it down to build it up] process is what we will have to go thru. There is an Arabic poet who wrote a line which my friend Raed had burned into my memory: ‘This nation needs to learn lessons in destruction.’"
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August 19, 2003
 
Darkness in Baghdad
After the bombing of U.N. headquarters in Iraq, Salam is upset: "I am plunging into a fucking depression, do we have a future? Is this country going to be hijacked by shit extremists who want to prove a point?"
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August 13, 2003
 
Salam Pax=Iraq's Weathervane
Salam strikes again and again. The famous blogger of Baghdad (and former interpreter of mine) wants the Americans to succeed in Iraq "because if the occupation forces fail, my country will fall apart." But Salam notes, in his blog, that "G. my friend got beaten up by US Army last night, he was handcuffed and had a bag put on his head. He was kicked several times and was made to lie on his face for a while. All he wanted to do was to take pictures and report on an attack, he works for the New York Times as a translator and fixer. He got more kicks for speaking English. His sin: he looks Iraqi and has a beard. Story will be told, I need to get him drunk enough to get the whole thing out of him."

And in his column in The Guardian, Salam reminds us that "As you go into Baghdad from the west there is graffiti on the walls that says 'Welcome to the Republic of Darkness and Unemployment.'" He attends a press conference by an Iraqi politician; the event was hosted by the Americans. "The press guy, at the request of the conference, was telling journalists that the instantaneous translation thingy has two channels; channel one for Arabic, channel two for English. I would like to add another channel: channel three for the truth. It keeps repeating one phrase: 'We have no power, we have to get it approved by the Americans, we are puppets and the strings are too tight.'"

Salam also recounts an unpleasant encounter with the Americans. "Earlier in the day I got frisked and the car I was in searched because the colonel or something who has just passed by thought that he didn't like the people who are standing by the car (me) and that I was giving him dirty looks. Habibi, you have no idea how dirty my looks can get, you didn't get one. What you saw was the I-have-been-standing-for-a-whole-hour-in-the-sun. But because you have the power to decide what a look means I got searched. You really should have looked more carefully before you shot the nine-year-old kid in Ramadi only to find out later that it was a water gun he had in his hands. Dirty looks--yeah, totally justified frisking me."
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August 10, 2003
 
Nuking the Nuke Threat
Before the war in Iraq, the American media generally went along with the White House's depiction of Saddam Hussein as an imminent threat to world security. Now, with no weapons of mass destruction uncovered in Iraq, the reporting is getting tougher. Today's Washington Post, in a 5,000-word investigative story, targets the White House's claims that Hussein was building a nuclear bomb: "The new information indicates a pattern in which President Bush, Vice President Cheney and their subordinates--in public and behind the scenes--made allegations depicting Iraq's nuclear weapons program as more active, more certain and more imminent in its threat than the data they had would support. On occasion administration advocates withheld evidence that did not conform to their views. The White House seldom corrected misstatements or acknowledged loss of confidence in information upon which it had previously relied."

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July 24, 2003
 
Silent Havana
If you have been to Havana and have been seduced by it, a new film will send you back, it seems. The film is called "Suite Habana" and is described, by The Guardian, as "stark, beautiful…the camerawork and soundtrack take the viewer on a bittersweet trip through the crumbling Cuban capital." Notably, it's a silent film, except for a musical soundtrack and city noises. The lack of dialogue has viewers wondering whether the film is a critique of Castro's Cuba or an ode to the country's resilience to U.S. hostility. The only way to find out is to visit Havana and see it at the Cine Charles Chaplin, in the Vedado district; it isn't playing outside the country, yet.

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June 25, 2003
 
Iraq: It's a Mess
Read all about it, sadly, in today's Washington Post. "'We've been given a job that we haven't prepared for, we haven't trained for, that we weren't ready for,' said a senior civil affairs officer in central Iraq. 'For a lot of the stuff we're doing, we're making it up as we go along.'" Or read about it from the perspective of a former ambassador who was sent to Baghdad to help the reconstruction effort. Timothy Carney writes: "I just finished eight hot, dusty weeks there trying to get the Ministry of Industry and Minerals running again. I offer these vignettes to show how flawed policy and incompetent administration have marred the follow-up to the brilliant military campaign to destroy Saddam Hussein's regime." And there's more in the latest column by Thomas Friedman, who writes, "A successful U.S. rebuilding of Iraq is the key to America's standing in the world right now. But Mssrs. Bush and Rumsfeld seem to be treating it like some lab test in which they can see how much nation-building they can buy with as little investment as possible. As one Marine officer said to me: There is something to be said for doing war on the cheap, but if you want to do war on the cheap, 'pick a country that doesn't matter.'"
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June 23, 2003
 
The Race to Baghdad, Cont.
My story in Outside, about my journey through Iraq, is posted here.
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June 9, 2003
 
The Race to Baghdad
What was it like to cover the war in Iraq? My 7,500-word story about my journey from Kuwait to Baghdad is in the July issue of Outside magazine. The article, "The Race to Baghdad," is not posted online yet but the issue is available at newsstands.

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June 7, 2003
 
Meet the New Boss
Dathar Khashab had what it took to maneuver his way up through the ranks in Saddam Hussein's oil bureaucracy. When his new managers showed up wearing U.S.-issue fatigues, he didn't miss a step. My latest story, about a G.I. and a Baathist, is in this weekend's issue of The New York Times Magazine.
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June 3, 2003
 
Salam Pax, Cont.
How was I to know that my Baghdad interpreter was famous? Public Radio International has posted a cute story about Salam Pax and the dimwitted foreign correspondents, including myself, who figured out who he is. Click here and scroll down to "Blog Report" for the audio file.
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June 2, 2003
 
Salam Pax Exists

During the war in Iraq, a blogger in Baghdad became a sensation on the Web, attracting a considerable following to his blog. He also attracted a considerable mystery--was he for real? I stumbled onto the answer, and my story about it, in Slate, is posted here.
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May 13, 2003
 
Talking About Sadr

If you want to know more about Muqtadah al-Sadr, the Iraqi Shiite leader whom I wrote about in The New York Times Magazine, Public Radio International has posted an interview they did with me. Scroll down to "Islam Interview."
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May 11, 2003
 
In Iraq, Theocrats and Americans

My latest story, in The New York Times Magazine, profiles Moqtadah al-Sadr, who wants Iraq governed by Islamic law. First he has to outsmart his rivals, outmaneuver the Americans and get Iraq’s millions of Shiites behind him. I’ve also written a story for the Week in Review section of the Times, about security problems in Baghdad and the narrow understanding that American soldiers and civilians have of them.
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April 28, 2003
 
Baghdad Dispatch

My latest story, in The New Republic, about Shia fundamentalism in Iraq, is posted here.
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April 21, 2003
 
Blogging Again, Lightly

It’s been a while since I lasted posted because I have been covering the war in Iraq. Internet access has been limited, and blogging will remain infrequent until I return to the United States. My stories on the war (and related issues) are posted on the "Magazine Articles" page of this site. The most recent story, in The New York Times Magazine, focuses on a bloody battle fought by a Marine battalion on the outskirts of Baghdad. I’ve also written about humanitarian aid during wartime, and I edited an essay about the death of a Marine in a Humvee accident.
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March 9, 2003
 
To Torture or Not to Torture?

If a captured terrorist does not wish to talk about attacks that his colleagues are planning, should he be made to talk? If so, how? That’s the subject of my latest story, in the Week in Review section of The New York Times. As the story explains, "The line between legitimate interrogation and outlawed torture is ill defined, and the reluctance of governments to disclose what they are doing intensifies this murkiness. It is nearly impossible to know whether, in a fetid basement cell in Cairo or Amman or Islamabad or Kabul, a suspected terrorist is having his limbs broken to safeguard against terrorism. And it is just as hard to know whether such deeds, if they are occurring, will enhance long-term national security or fuel a desire for retribution against America."


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March 1, 2003
 
"Magical realism, Middle East-style"

From the cover story in this weekend’s New York Times Magazine: "War seldom creates democracy; according to a recent article in The Christian Science Monitor, of the 18 regime changes forced by the United States in the 20th century, only 5 resulted in democracy, and in the case of wars fought unilaterally, the number goes down to one--Panama. Democracy takes root from within, over a long period of time, in conditions that have never prevailed in Iraq. For democracy to have a chance there would require a lengthy and careful American commitment to nation-building--which could easily look to Iraqis and other Arabs like colonialism. Nor can we be sure that democracy, in Iraq or elsewhere, will lead to pro-American regimes; it might lead to the opposite. ‘The idea that there's a small democracy inside every society waiting to be released just isn't true,’ Carothers says. ‘If we're pinning our hopes on the idea that this will lead to a democratic change throughout the region, then we're invading for the wrong reason.’ Jessica T. Mathews, president of the Carnegie Endowment, adds, '"We've suffered so much that the only alternative is democracy"--as soon as you say it, you realize there's a mile between the beginning and end of that sentence.’"


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February 27, 2003
 
The Not-So-Quiet Americans

President Bush believes that getting rid of Saddam Hussein will bring democracy to the Middle East. "A new regime in Iraq would serve as a dramatic and inspiring example of freedom for other nations in the region," he said yesterday. A nice idea, but as The Washington Post points out, the liberation of Kuwait more than a decade ago was expected to make that country more democratic, and it hasn’t; women still can’t vote, they can’t go to college with men, and political parties are not allowed. "Nobody believes the war will bring democracy to the Arab world," a Kuwaiti professor says. "Look at Kuwait. I don't buy it."

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February 4, 2003
 
Gone

BELGRADE, Serbia-Montenegro (AP)--Lawmakers formally abolished Yugoslavia on Tuesday and replaced it with a loose union of its remaining two republics, Serbia and Montenegro, marking the final demise of the troubled Balkan federation.

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February 3, 2003
 
Photos from the Front

Because we live in a time of war, one of the best websites of our times is The Digital Journalist. It is a monthly magazine, published only on the web, that features the best war photography of the day and of the past. The current issue includes the timeless work of Larry Burrows from the Vietnam war, as well as an elegiac photo essay by Roger Richards about the Bosnia war (for which I wrote a brief introduction). The webzine’s archives contain a tremendous exhibit of Peter Turnley’s photos from the first Gulf war, as well as an assemblage of frontline pictures from the VII photo agency, which includes Jim Nachtwey, Ron Haviv, Gary Knight, Chris Morris and John Stanmeyer. The photos on the site are a reminder of everything that politicians and pundits don't tell you about war.


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February 1, 2003
 
When Al Qaeda Calls

On an April day in London last year, Yosri Fouda's cellphone rang, and a stranger introduced himself by saying, "I'm a viewer of your show." He claimed to be in a position to "provide something top secret" and asked for Fouda's fax number. Then he hung up.

For the rest of my latest story, in this weekend’s New York Times Magazine, click here or here.

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January 29, 2003
 
Moonlighting in Iraq

From The Los Angeles Times: "If past is precedent, argues Benjamin Works, executive director of the Strategic Issues Research Institute, a military think tank in Arlington, Va., the phases of the moon would dictate precise timing. The air campaigns over Iraq in 1991, as well as those over Kosovo in Yugoslavia and over Afghanistan, all began on nights when the waning moon didn't rise until 4 a.m. That provided cover for aircraft that might otherwise have been silhouetted against the moon. The next such phase will begin about Feb. 26 and continue for about 12 days."

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January 24, 2003
 
Tarantino Meets Zola in Brazil


The most exciting film of the year is City of God, by the Brazilian director Fernando Meirelles. The movie is so fast-paced, so complicated yet seamless, so intricately shot, that it’s hard to get it out of your mind hours or days later. It tells the violent story of slum life in Rio, and most of the actors were found on the streets by Meirelles and trained in a series of acting workshops. The Washington Post gets the movie right: "It's a trip to hell and back, and testimony for embittered cynics of all that a movie can be."

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January 23, 2003
 
"Now you are kidnapped"

A year after the kidnapping and murder of Daniel Pearl, The Wall Street Journal has published a lengthy article that provides new details, including the email exchanges between Pearl and his kidnappers in the days leading up to the abduction. On January 23, 2002, the Journal reporter was lured to a restaurant in Karachi, ostensibly to meet a fundamentalist leader. Today's story explains what happened next:

"People familiar with the interrogations of suspects say they later revealed that a single, unarmed kidnapper driving a car awaited Mr. Pearl at the Village Restaurant, with one or two more apparently out of sight on a motorcycle. Mr. Pearl climbed into the vehicle and was driven for about 40 minutes to the northern outskirts of the city. The car, led by the motorcycle, pulled into a small compound with a two-room building, and Mr. Pearl stepped out of the car.

"On the motorcycle was a man named Naeem Bukhari. He was the leader of the Karachi chapter of a militant group called Lashkar-e-Jhangvi, and sought in connection with dozens of murders of members of Pakistan's Shiite minority. Police say Mr. Bukhari got off the motorcycle, walked over to Mr. Pearl and put his arm around his shoulders as though in friendship, but then he used the other hand to put a gun to Mr. Pearl's ribs. 'Now you are kidnapped,' he said, according to the person familiar with the case, who adds: ‘Danny thought he was joking, but once they were inside they made him strip to check him.’"


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January 15, 2003
 
The Military, the Journalists, the Product

During the Gulf and Afghan wars, the Pentagon had a clear policy about press access to U.S. troops—the less the better. That’s changing. Victoria Clarke, the Pentagon spokeswoman, outlined a new policy in a background meeting with Washington bureau chiefs this week, and the Pentagon helpfully posted a transcript on its website (if the link happens to be down, as it was this afternoon, you can download the file by clicking here). The transcript offers a rare glimpse into the give-and-take between the military and the media over coverage of a war. The good news is that the Pentagon will "embed" a significant number of journalists with military units, and if the journalists wish, they will be "embedded for life"—from the time a unit leaves the U.S. until it returns home. The bad news is that all "embeds" must be organized and approved by the Pentagon; commanders in the field will not have the authority to invite reporters along for the ride to Baghdad. As it happens, Clarke and her colleagues in the Pentagon have an interesting tendency to refer to war stories as "the product." The word appears 13 times in the transcript, as in, "It might be that your equipment can't get the product out and we may be in a position where we can move your product and commanders are going to be encouraged to assist you in that."

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January 12, 2003
 
Slouching Towards Baghdad

When I wrote for The Washington Post my boss was Michael Getler, who was in charge of the paper’s foreign coverage. He was a wizard at his job, and in his current position, as the Post’s ombudsman, he is, once more, a provocative master. In his column today, he chides the media for being too timid and not asking hard questions about the upcoming (it seems) war with Iraq: "Since 9/11, Bush has become a popular president and leader. But you could argue that because of 9/11, debate over national security issues has not been as intense as it should have been, that challenging the president was just too risky. Whatever was proper, there now seems, to me at least, a sense of unreality about this moment. A war is approaching that may go fast and well. But in this new environment, one doesn't have a strong sense of whether the effect and aftermath will be the start of a better era or the beginning of something even worse. The burden of war will be borne by a tiny fraction of Americans who happen to be in the military or reserves. No sacrifice is asked of anyone else. A possibly more dangerous crisis has arisen in North Korea, yet the talk is of tax cuts. In another month or two, it will be too late for second thoughts, or for discovering things that the government should have thought about, the press should have asked about and the public should have been told about."

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January 8, 2003
 
Pardon My Language


I write for American publications that do not, in general, permit profanity. This is painful because I tend to write about people for whom profanity is oxygen, and their curses convey a sense of who they are. Alas, rules are rules. A particularly genteel publication once air-brushed a line in which I quoted someone as saying, "I was not doing jack." The deletion was required, my editor explained, because the quote implied a forbidden word.

British newspapers don’t mind the occasional oath. The Guardian, in a fine example of this, has run a controversial cover illustration for its tabloid section, known as G2. Designed by Gillian Wearing, a cutting-edge artist, the cover consists of three words: "Fuck Cilla Black." A large number of readers complained because "Fuck" was printed so prominently (the word appears, on average, twice a day in the paper, in smaller print), and because it was directed at a warm television personality who, among the many celebrities whose names might deservedly be preceded by an unlovely assemblage of four letters, would be the least deserving.

Ian Katz, the features editor of The Guardian, wrote an entertaining story today about the affair. He notes that among the stream of complaints, "A number of readers who took the time to find out which editor had taken the decision to run the Wearing cover proffered a succinct comment: Fuck Ian Katz." The cover story revolved around two events: the screening of a coarse reality show, "Without Prejudice," and Cilla Black's resignation from "Blind Date," a tame show. As Katz writes, "The idea for our cover story began to crystallise: nastiness was the new fashion on British TV and Cilla simply wasn't nasty enough to cut it on the new Mean TV." The cover was intended to convey "the voice of Mean TV passing judgment on a cuddly matriarch from another age of television."

Katz doesn’t buy the argument that young children might be corrupted by The Guardian’s standards. "Any parent knows that almost any child over the age of six will be exposed daily to (and will almost certainly be using) language that would make Wearing sound like a country vicar...We regularly feature images on our pages every bit as shocking as any language used in the paper. In recent months we have published photographs, sometimes on the front page of the newspaper, of burned bodies in Kenya, a dead Taliban soldier close up, countless dead or dying victims on both sides of the Middle Eastern conflict and bodies being dragged from the aftermath of the Moscow theatre siege. If, as parents, we think this is suitable material for our children, does it make sense to say judiciuous use of bad language is not?"

True, but creative gentility has its uses. Last year I wrote a story about an Afghan warlord, Gul Agha, whose favorite word is "motherfucker." My editor suggested a series of wonderful alterations that made the published quotes more humorous without the curses. The following passages involve a luncheon at which I sat next to Gul Agha:

A man walks up, looking for a spot on the floor. Gul Agha eyes him and says, "Take off your shoes," and addresses him with an insult to him and his mother. The shoes vanish in a split-second shuffle, and everyone laughs, including Gul Agha, who uses profanity as a way of saying hello. With his audience assembled and warmed up, it is time to talk about his favorite subject: war.

"When the enemy attacks," Gul Agha begins, "I fight them face to face. I do not hide behind my soldiers. When I came into the Kandahar airport, we were in four cars, and I was in the first car. The Arabs came at us. I told my soldiers that anyone who runs is a [see insult above]. I took out my Kalashnikov and killed three Arabs. When my soldiers saw that I killed three Arabs, they were encouraged and jumped from their cars and ran at the Arabs. We killed 18 Arabs at the gate of the airport."

…Gul Agha is ready to tell another story. "Mullah Omar said, 'I want to fight Gul Agha once because I have heard about him a lot, and I want to see if he is a good fighter.' I said, 'I will give you a knife, and I will have a knife, and we will be alone, face to face, and we'll see which [that expletive, again] will shout first" -- and once more, the insult involving one's mother.


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January 6, 2003
 
Correction of the Day

"WASHINGTON (AP) -- In a Jan. 3 story about government approval of Prozac for children, The Associated Press, using incorrect information from the Food and Drug Administration, erroneously reported that up to 25 percent of children suffer depression. The FDA says the correct figure is 2.5 percent."

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January 5, 2003
 
Honesty About Oil


People who suggest that oil is the prime reason America might invade Iraq have tended to oppose the war for that very reason—fighting over oil would seem to be an unacceptably mercenary endeavor. Tom Friedman squares the circle today, saying the war is about oil, and that’s okay. "There is nothing illegitimate or immoral about the U.S. being concerned that an evil, megalomaniacal dictator might acquire excessive influence over the natural resource that powers the world's industrial base," he writes. "It is impossible to explain the Bush team's behavior otherwise. Why are they going after Saddam Hussein with the 82nd Airborne and North Korea with diplomatic kid gloves--when North Korea already has nuclear weapons, the missiles to deliver them, a record of selling dangerous weapons to anyone with cash, 100,000 U.S. troops in its missile range and a leader who is even more cruel to his own people than Saddam? One reason, of course, is that it is easier to go after Saddam. But the other reason is oil--even if the president doesn't want to admit it."

For a good overview of the oil stakes, the folks at Foreign Policy in Focus have issued a new and excellent report.
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December 28, 2002
 
Plowshares Into Swords

This may tell us more about the consequences of 9/11 than anything else. Metal from the World Trade Center is being used to build a new warship.

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December 23, 2002
 
Dazed and Confused in Baghdad

Tolstoy began "Anna Karenina" with his now-famous line, "Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." His view might hold true in the political world, too—successful regimes are all alike, while every failing regime fails in its own way. That’s one of the strange rewards of foreign reporting: you can watch an unsuccessful regime unravel before your eyes yet you cannot know the course or pace of the unravelling. Deconstruction can be just as creative as construction. The process of collapse—unpredictable and riveting—would appear to be underway in Iraq. For a taste of it, read this dispatch from John Burns, who gets under the skin of things in Baghdad: "In his speeches, Mr. Hussein has sounded like a man terminally vexed, oscillating between submission and defiance. Generals he has put forward to speak about weapons--and to prepare the 12,000-page declaration now condemned for its omissions by Washington and by Hans Blix, leader of the inspection teams--have reacted, at times, like men not sure whether full disclosure is the order of the day, or whether their brief is to admit only as much as the enemy is likely to find out."

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When an American Car Hits a Double Standard in Kenya

An American diplomat in Nairobi attends a party at his ambassador’s residence and, possibly after a drink or two, gets into a head-on collision with a car driven by a teacher. The diplomat calls the American Embassy for help, a security detail arrives and whisks him away to a hospital, while the occupants of the other car are left behind, because it is assumed they are Kenyans. Reuben Gray, an African-American who teaches the diplomat’s son at the International School of Kenya, dies. Why didn’t the American diplomat or the Embassy security detail bother to help him? Had he been white, would he have received assistance? An excellent story in today’s Washington Post.
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December 19, 2002
 
Nestle to (Famine-Hit) Ethiopia: Give Us More Money!

Fact #1: Ethiopia faces a famine that could be worse than the one that took a million lives in 1984.
Fact #2: Many years ago Ethiopia’s government nationalized a minor company partly owned by Nestle.
Fact #3: Ethiopia is offering $1.5 million to Nestle, which earned $3.9 billion in net profits last year.
Fact #4: Nestle is demanding $6 million.
Read all about it in The Guardian.

UPDATE: Nestle backs down, promising to return to Ethiopia whatever funds it receives in the settlement.

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December 15, 2002
 
Disappearing in America

This is not a good time to be considered an "enemy combatant." If you want to know why, click here to read my latest story in The New York Times Magazine.

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December 9, 2002
 
Being and Adaptation

A few nights ago I saw "Adaptation," the smartest movie since "Being John Malkovich." There’s a reason why.

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December 1, 2002
 
Brother, Can You Spare $200 Billion?

The cost of invading Iraq, according to The Washington Post. No refund from Saudi Arabia this time.

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November 25, 2002
 
Shakespeare Explains the Balkans

The Bosnian war had its share of unforgettable monsters—Slobodan Milosevic, Franjo Tudjman, Ratko Mladic and Radovan Karadzic come to mind—but the most intriguing (and least notorious) was Nikola Koljevic, a Shakespearean scholar who was an architect of the attempted genocide against Bosnia’s Muslims. In a new book, Gojko Beric recalls that Koljevic said, in a moment of despair near the end of his life, that Shakespeare summed up things best in the final act of "Richard III."

I met Koljevic many times and always wondered what he thought about the murder he bore responsibility for; an expert on Shakespeare should know something about human nature, after all. Koljevic shot himself in the head in 1997, so that was an answer of sorts, but the fullest answer, and the best insight into the mind of a war criminal who begins to realize the evil he has done, comes from the work of Shakespeare that Koljevic cited before his suicide. Here is Richard III’s monologue:

"Give me another horse: bind up my wounds.
Have mercy, Jesu!--Soft! I did but dream.
O coward conscience, how dost thou afflict me!
The lights burn blue. It is now dead midnight.
Cold fearful drops stand on my trembling flesh.
What do I fear? myself? there's none else by:
Richard loves Richard; that is, I am I.
Is there a murderer here? No. Yes, I am:
Then fly. What, from myself? Great reason why:
Lest I revenge. What, myself upon myself?
Alack. I love myself. Wherefore? for any good
That I myself have done unto myself?
O, no! alas, I rather hate myself
For hateful deeds committed by myself!
I am a villain: yet I lie. I am not.
Fool, of thyself speak well: fool, do not flatter.
My conscience hath a thousand several tongues,
And every tongue brings in a several tale,
And every tale condemns me for a villain.
Perjury, perjury, in the high'st degree
Murder, stem murder, in the direst degree;
All several sins, all used in each degree,
Throng to the bar, crying all, Guilty! guilty!
I shall despair. There is no creature loves me;
And if I die, no soul shall pity me:
Nay, wherefore should they, since that I myself
Find in myself no pity to myself?
Methought the souls of all that I had murder'd
Came to my tent; and every one did threat
To-morrow's vengeance on the head of Richard."

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The Internet Meets Philanthropy

Organizations like United Way can give philanthropy a bad name. This story in The New York Times outlines the deceptive manner in which United Way accounts for the money it receives, and as the Times notes, "Its accounting practices raise questions for potential donors who want to know precisely how much of their contributions go to people in need rather than the organization helping them." It doesn’t have to be that way. A friend recently emailed me about a web-based organization, Donors Choose, which focuses on underfunded public schools in New York City and allows donors to browse a list, posted on its website, of modestly-priced proposals from teachers who need resources of one sort or another--an overhead projector for a school in the Bronx, a set of encyclopedias for a class in Manhattan, funding for a field trip to the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, etc. Finding worthy projects, and funding them, is as easy as shopping at Amazon.com.

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November 18, 2002
 
How to Win Friends and Influence People--In Afghanistan

Bob Woodward’s new book, "Bush at War," offers more details on the campaign to buy victory in Afghanistan. According to an excerpt in today’s Washington Post, a senior CIA undercover agent, named Gary, flew into Afghanistan on September 26, 2001. He had a briefcase stuffed with $3 million in cash.

--"Gary's first meeting that evening was with engineer Muhammed Arif Sawari, who headed the Alliance's intelligence and security service…Gary placed a bundle of cash on the table: $500,000 in 10 stacks of $100 bills. He believed it would be more impressive than the usual $200,000, the best way to say: We're here, we're serious, here's money, we know you need it. ‘What we want you to do is use it,’ he said. ‘Buy food, weapons, whatever you need to build your forces up.’ It was also for intelligence operations and to pay sources and agents. There was more money available -- much more. Gary would soon ask CIA headquarters for and receive $10 million in cash."

--"The next day, Sept. 27, about noon local time in the Panjshir Valley, Gary sat down with Gen. Mohammed Fahim, commander of the Northern Alliance forces, and Abdullah, the Alliance foreign minister. He put $1 million on the table, explaining that they could use it as they saw fit."

--"The Northern Alliance was trying to induce defections from the Taliban itself, but the CIA could come in and offer cash. The agency's hand would often be hidden as the negotiations began -- $10,000 for this sub-commander and his dozens of fighters, $50,000 for this bigger commander and his hundreds of fighters. In one case, $50,000 was offered to a commander to defect. Let me think about it, the commander said. So the Special Forces A-team directed a J-DAM precision bomb right outside the commander's headquarters. The next day, they called the commander back. How about $40,000? He accepted."

--"In all, the U.S. commitment to overthrow the Taliban had been about 110 CIA officers and 316 Special Forces personnel, plus massive air power."

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November 16, 2002
 
Cash Killed the Taliban

In a story that previews Bob Woodward’s new book, "Bush at War," The Washington Post reports that the purchase of warlords' loyalty played a large role in toppling the Taliban from power. "The CIA spent $70 million in direct cash outlays on the ground in Afghanistan, a figure that also included money for setting up field hospitals. ‘That's one bargain,’ the president said in an interview with Woodward last August. The money was handed out by about a half-dozen CIA teams spread through the country, starting with a 10-man paramilitary team code-named ‘Jawbreaker’ that landed in Afghanistan on Sept. 27, 2001. The team leader carried $3 million in a single attache case."

It sounds familiar.

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November 12, 2002
 
The Quiet American

On September 10, 2001 a test audience viewed an early cut of "The Quiet American," which stars Michael Caine and Brendan Fraser in an adaptation of Graham Greene’s classic novel about America’s unfortunate foray into Vietnam. The audience loved the film but a day later the world changed and Miramax suspended its release because a movie that questioned the wisdom of empire building, or empire defending, was unlikely to fare well at the box office. As the novel’s world-weary journalist says, memorably, of the quiet American who tried to do good in Vietnam, "I never knew a man who had better motives for all the trouble he caused." The film is coming out next week in New York and Los Angeles, and if the standing ovation it received at the recent Toronto Film Festival is any indication, it is quite good. The Washington Post has an opinion piece about the controversy that surrounds it; for a trailer, click here and scroll down to "The Quiet American."

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November 10, 2002
 
A Bulletproof Mind

My newest story, about the Special Forces, is in today’s New York Times Magazine, and is posted here and here. This is how it begins:

Major Christopher Miller lay awake on a cot in a filthy room, no larger than a prison cell and cluttered with weapons and ammunition. He couldn't sleep. It was a cold January night at the Special Forces base in Kandahar, and Miller was on the verge of commanding an assault against six Qaeda fighters barricaded inside a nearby Afghan hospital. So many things could go wrong, Miller realized, and it could be disastrous if any of them did. For the first time in his life, Miller would be engaging in C.Q.B. -- a military abbreviation for ''close-quarters battle.'' After years of training, he would finally become, as he told me recently, a ''manager of violence.'' An eight-year veteran of the Special Forces, he had never killed before, had never given an order to kill, had not even seen a dead soldier. All that would change at dawn, because men would surely die in an attack he would initiate with a one-word command: execute.

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November 8, 2002
 
John Burns Talks About Iraq

It’s not easy competing against John Burns, who has won two Pulitzer Prizes for his overseas reporting. I learned this the hard way, when he was based in Sarajevo for The New York Times in the early 1990s and I was working there for The Washington Post. We nearly got into a fistfight, at a crummy hotel in the Bosnian Serb capital of Pale, over who would sleep on a scarce bed and who would sleep on the unclean floor. Amid the combat among Serbs, Croats and Muslims, it would have been particularly surreal for the representatives of America’s two most influential newspapers to engage in their own brawl—or, in the way that everything was twisted in Bosnia at the time, it might have been appropriate.

Nearly a decade later, all was forgotten. Last year I worked in Pakistan and Afghanistan for The New York Times Magazine, alongside Burns, who was the focal point of the Times’ coverage of the Afghan war. He could not have been more considerate or engaging. I mention this because Burns was interviewed at length on Fresh Air today. If you want to know what it was like to be in tumultuous Iraq in recent weeks—when Saddam Hussein won 100 percent of the vote in a referendum to extend his rule, then released all prisoners from his jails, which prompted a regime-shaking protest by relatives of prisoners who had disappeared—you should listen to Burns, who knows his stuff better than anyone else. One of a kind.

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Being Peter Maass, or Peter Maas, or Peter Moss

A year ago, Peter Maas died. M-a-a-s. I did not rejoice, but I thought his passing would make my life less complicated, because for as long as I’ve been a writer I’ve been confused with Peter Maas (one "s", not two), who wrote "Serpico", "The Valachi Papers" and a number of other books that had, for the most part, mafia themes. I’ve written about this dilemma before—click here for my Slate story on the topic—so I won’t go into the details. But I will mention that The New York Times Magazine will feature on Sunday a story I wrote about the Special Forces, and today I was interviewed on CNN about it, as well as on WBUR, the Boston affiliate of NPR, and both outfits managed to spell my name inaccurately. Not that I’m sensitive about this, but the graphics that flashed on CNN identified me, repeatedly, as "Peter Maas," and the transcript posted on CNN's website refers to me, repeatedly, as "Peter Moss." WBUR names me as, of course, Peter Maas.

Again, not that I mind.

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November 1, 2002
 
Does Torture Work?

On a recent trip to Pakistan, I spent a fair amount of time with Jameel Yusuf, who heads a semi-official crime-fighting organization in Karachi. He described to me his interrogation of two members of a kidnapping gang: "When we get two guys, it is very nice, very easy. One guy was weaker so he broke really fast. I told him, `Look, I am going to torture you so much that you might die. We don't bother about that because we have two of you. Whether a man in custody dies or not, who cares? You better save your life. The earlier you speak up the better; otherwise let's see how much torture you can take. If you die we will throw you out. Who cares?'" For more about Yusuf and the unpleasant ways in which America’s allies are cracking down on suspected terrorists, click here or here for my cover story in this week's issue of The New Republic.

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October 20, 2002
 
When Fear Kills

The Washington Post has a terrific story about the manner in which fear, rather than the at-large sniper, is raising the risks of living in the D.C. area. "Is it meaningful," the story asks, "to suggest that the risk of being shot by the sniper is tiny compared with risks you take every day, like driving, jaywalking or smoking?" The story, written by David Ropeik, director of risk communication at the Harvard Center for Risk Analysis, notes that the odds of being killed by the sniper are 517,422 to one. The odds of being killed in a car accident are far higher, yet people are driving out of their way to avoid places where they think they might get shot. "Fear, born of that most ancient and genetically embedded imperative—survival—is real, and at times far overpowers reason," Ropeik writes. "This is one of those times."

Ropeik's insights into risk and human behavior relate to more than the sniper killings:

"It is also fair to suggest that fear is, in and of itself, a risk. Frightened people seeking a sense of safety can make dangerous choices: to drive extra miles to avoid a location they think is unsafe, to buy a gun they're not trained to use, or to reduce their physical exercise by staying indoors or close to home. In fact, just the stress of fear is dangerous. It raises levels of certain hormones that suppress the immune system, thus increasing our susceptibility to infectious disease. We have to fear the sniper, but we also have to fear fear itself. It's a complicated conflict between our natural, self-protective emotions on the one hand and, on the other, the risk that our fears might actually exacerbate the dangers we face.

Psychologists who study this field, known as risk perception, find that humans tend to fear similar things for similar reasons. Essentially, risks have unique affective characteristics that cause us to be more or less afraid, regardless of the facts…Some responses do more to make us feel safe than they do to protect us. Driving extra miles to avoid perceived danger zones increases the probability of our being in a motor vehicle crash far more than it reduces our chances of being shot. Buying a gun for protection makes us the owner of a weapon that is both reassuring and dangerous, a weapon that research shows is far more likely to be fired for reasons other than self-defense.

There is a battle between fear and fact taking place in the hearts and minds of my relatives and friends in the D.C. area, and all their friends. It's a cautionary tale for all of us, whether we're facing snipers, West Nile virus, child abductions or terrorism. Frightened people can make dangerous choices. Understanding why risks make us so afraid can help us apply both our emotional and our rational sides to the challenge of making ourselves safe."

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October 11, 2002
 
Four Arguments Against Invading Iraq

One.
Two.
Three.
Four.


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October 7, 2002
 
Crossfire Meets C-Span, on the Web

If you’ve been waiting, as I have, for an intelligent, focused and spirited debate about invading Iraq, your wait is over. No, it’s not occurring in the halls of Congress or in the opinion pages of The New York Times or on CNN in non-primetime hours. It’s taking place at Slate, the online magazine, which has begun a "dialogue" among its writers. The series got off to a snoozy start but anti-invasion offerings by Robert Wright (you’ll need to scroll down to it) and others led to a withering rebuke from Jeffrey Goldberg (again, you’ll need to scroll down to it), to which Wright shot back (scroll once more), eliciting another salvo from Goldberg, to which Steve Chapman took immediate exception. It’s smart and riveting stuff; I don’t know of any place where you’ll find sharper arguments in favor of, and against, an invasion of Iraq.


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October 4, 2002
 
Journalists and War Crimes (cont.)

Public Radio International interviewed me yesterday about journalists being called upon to testify, against their wishes, at the war crimes tribunal in the Hague. If you have an idle six minutes in which you would enjoy nothing more than listening to the interview, click here and scroll down to "Peter Maass Interview."

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October 3, 2002
 
Prisoner Milosevic: The Diaries

If a prize existed for the oddest diary of the year, Dragisa Blanusa would be the surefire winner. He was the governor of the Belgrade jail in which Slobodan Milosevic was held for 89 days before being extradited to the Hague. Last year Blanusa published his diary in Serbia, and Granta has just translated extracts of it. Some highlights:


April 1: At four-thirty a.m., the Interior Ministry warned me that Milosevic was on his way. Within minutes, a Chrysler jeep and two BMWs with darkened windows swept through the gates and screeched to a halt in the jail yard. Slobodan Milosevic stepped out of one of the BMWs. He was talking into his mobile phone, pleading with his wife to calm down. "Mira...Mira..." he said. Milosevic was taken to our reception department, where a guard confiscated his belt, shoelaces and tie. "Don't worry," Milosevic smirked. "I'm not going to hang myself."

April 8: Milosevic's daughter, Marija, came to visit with Mira. Milosevic was delighted to see his daughter. "Where have you been?" he bellowed. "My little terrorist!"

April 16: I wondered whether it might be better for him to see his wife and daughter less often. Whenever they visited, they took his blood pressure and talked all the time about doctors and drug treatments. This irritated Milosevic immensely. Yet his blood pressure would jump with worry if Mira was even five minutes late. On one occasion, he told the prison doctor: "Doctor, I don't know what to do. Marija screams, Mira cries, and I have to put up with it all."

May 3: Goran Cavlina delivered The Hague indictment. "I won't even touch that pile of shit," Milosevic declared. The judge was not deterred. He put the envelope between the bars of Milosevic's cell. Milosevic asked the guards to take it away. "We're very sorry, but we can't do that," they said. So the indictment sits between the bars, with Milosevic grumbling that it's been left there without his consent.

May 5: Milosevic reads a great deal both in English and in Serbian. He reads thrillers mainly, as well as mysteries and spy novels. Among the books he has read are: Wilbur Smith, "The Seventh Scroll," Robert Ludlum, "The Corsican Story," Ivo Andric, "The Bridge on the Drina," Petar Petrovic Njegos, "The Mountain Wreath," Joseph Murphy, "The Power of Your Subconscious Mind," John Steinbeck, "The Grapes of Wrath," C. S. Forester, "Captain Hornblower" and "Lieutenant Hornblower" and "Admiral Hornblower."

May 22: I told the ex-president that the Helsinki Committee for Human Rights wants to come and visit him. "I'm not an animal to be displayed for everyone to stare at," Milosevic snorted. "Let them stick it up their mother's cunt. They are world-class shits. Scum."

May 27: Mira and Marija came again. Whenever Slobo and Mira meet they indulge in long romantic kisses. They look like a young couple in love and they don't seem to care who's watching them. Mira will kiss his hands and he'll kiss hers. I once saw her kiss his knee. Mira calls Slobodan "My little one," and he says it back to her. She'll call him "My puppy," and he'll call her "My little kitten." Sometimes the kisses go on for so long that the guards have to pull them apart. Marija gets very upset at this and her father tells her: "Marija dear, they are simply doing their job."


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October 1, 2002
 
Where's Osama?

Not in President Bush’s vocabulary. According to The Washington Post, "a search of the White House Web site indicates Bush has not made an unprompted mention of bin Laden's name since March 8. That day, at a GOP gathering in Florida, the president spoke of ‘this bin Laden fellow,’ and vowed: ‘We're going to find him.’ The last time Bush spoke the hated name in any public forum was a July 8 press conference, in which he was specifically asked if he would find bin Laden."

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September 30, 2002
 
The Jetsons Go To Afghanistan


File this in the "department of little-known tales about the Special Forces": the Taliban, fearful and confused, believed the Americans possessed a "death ray" that could incinerate any target. This and other colorful nuggets about the Special Forces can be found on an excellent website for a PBS documentary that aired a few weeks ago. A Special Forces soldier recalled how General Rashid Dostum exploited, to ingenius advantage, the Taliban misperceptions: "At Kunduz, we were negotiating back and forth to try to get these guys to surrender. They were saying, ‘We'll surrender, we'll march into your camp, but we want to keep our guns.’ Dostum finally said, ‘Put your guns down, take your jackets off, march in here or we're turning the Americans onto you with the death ray.’ Instantly you could see the guys bend over. They put their guns down, they took their cloaks off and they started marching in, in single file right up into the middle of our perimeter, because they knew that it was over if that death ray was coming out." Another Special Forces soldier provided the best explanation, or at least the most colorful one, of the strangeness of the war: "This whole situation is like the Flintstones meet the Jetsons."

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September 22, 2002
 
How To Decapitate Iraq's Government


Today’s Washington Post has an intriguing story about the Pentagon’s plans for invading Iraq. A rapid assault is being considered in which a softening-up bombing campaign could be as short as two or three days, followed by fast-moving land attacks aimed not at troops, bases and bridges but "regime targets," such as Saddam Hussein’s hometown, Tikrit. "Our interest is to get there very quickly, decapitate the regime, and open the place up, demonstrating that we're there to liberate, not to occupy," one military planner tells the Post. The paper quotes another planner as saying, "The Iraqi military will be told, ‘if you come out of your staging areas, you’ll be destroyed, but if you stay, you’ll live.’" If the fighting goes well, it could be over in a week, according to the best-case scenario.

Two other articles worth reading about Iraq: this one, by Jim Fallows in The Atlantic, notes the great difficulty we may have governing Iraq after Saddam has been ousted. And in this story, in The New Yorker, Nicholas Lemann argues that the war on Iraq distracts America from the threat posed by Al Qaeda. The piece includes the following quote from Steven Van Evera: "Defining it as a broad war on terror was a tremendous mistake. It should have been a war on Al Qaeda. Don't take your eye off the ball. Subordinate every other policy to it, including the policies toward Russia, the Arab-Israeli conflict, and Iraq. Instead, the Administration defined it as a broad war on terror, including groups that have never taken a swing at the United States and never will. It leads to a loss of focus. Al Qaeda escapes through the cracks...We're not out of Bosnia and Kosovo yet, and Iraq is much bigger. It's a huge occupation and reconstruction. We aren't good at this."

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September 15, 2002
 
Eastern Europe's New Wave

What’s with the emergence of exceptional novels by Eastern Europeans or about Eastern Europe? The trend began a few months ago, with new books by Jonathan Safran Foer, Gary Shteyngart and Arthur Phillips. Joining the list is Aleksandar Hemon, whose new novel, "Nowhere Man," is being released this week. Hemon, a Bosnian who lives in the U.S. and writes in English, has a wonderful literary touch, so I hope to find the time to read his newest offering, about which Shteyngart has written a rave review in The New York Times.

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Who Gets Iraq's Oil?

It's possible to disagree with the Bush team, but it's not possible to accuse them of being stupid. One of the levers they are using to gain support for an invasion of Iraq is the control of oil resources after Saddam becomes a former dictator. As The Washington Post helpfully explains, countries that support the invasion will find their oil companies rewarded with reconstruction and exploration contracts. Governments that drag their heels or oppose the U.S. will be shut out of a country that holds the world's largest oil reserves after Saudi Arabia. James Woolsey, the former CIA director, is blunt about the situation: "France and Russia have oil companies and interests in Iraq. They should be told that if they are of assistance in moving Iraq toward decent government, we'll do the best we can to ensure that the new government and American companies work closely with them...If they throw in their lot with Saddam, it will be difficult to the point of impossible to persuade the new Iraqi government to work with them."

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September 9, 2002
 
Big Brother Goes To School

A sign of the times: a high school in southern California is using wireless cameras to track every person and car arriving on campus. Hall monitors will soon carry wireless computers to access the database, and the school is considering an upgrade to face-recognition software. According to The Los Angeles Times, these measures are a response to the twin fears of terrorism and school shootings. Jerry Parli, who has two granddaughters at West Hills High School, doesn’t mind: "It's a terrible thing, but it's time to embrace Big Brother."

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September 5, 2002
 
The Best Reason To Not Watch TV On 9/11

If you are not already suffering 9/11-itis, you will after reading this. A game-show winner has been invited to sing the national anthem at the Lincoln Memorial tribute.

I was in the Balkans when the WTC attack happened last year, so I'm less emotionally invested in its anniversary than my New York friends. At the risk of sounding unpatriotic, which I believe I'm not, I think the media is going overboard in its coverage. Surprising? Not at all. But the game-show ridiculousness at the Lincoln Memorial is just one indicator of many that the remembrance of a tragedy is being turned into a promotional farce. September 12 cannot arrive soon enough.

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August 29, 2002
 
The Journalist and the Dictator

Jacky Rowland, who reported for the BBC from Belgrade for several years, did not see Slobodan Milosevic in the flesh until this week, when she testified against him at the U.N. war crimes tribunal in the Hague. It was an intriguing encounter that she writes about in today's Guardian. Amusingly, when Rowland visited, before her court appearance, the prosecutor of the case, Geoffrey Nice, she noticed a comedy show on his television, and when she asked what to expect from Milosevic's cross-examination, Nice told her not to worry. "Oh, old Grumpy Paws will probably want to ask you a few questions," he said.

Old Grumpy Paws?

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August 26, 2002
 
"You will never understand."

Tony Kushner has never been to Afghanistan yet in a hallucinatory passage in his play, "Homebody/Kabul," he conveys the utter strangeness of the country and its unfortunate people. The script has recently been published and the passage in question, though losing some of its power on the printed page, still strikes me as brilliant and far better at communicating the disfigured Afghan psyche, and the difficulty we have understanding it, than anything I have read in newspapers or magazines (or written myself).

The passage comes in the first act, which is a monologue by an English housewife who is the "homebody" of the play’s title (she will travel to Kabul and disappear there). She is sitting in her London home and recalls her recent purchase of ten hats; the shopkeeper happened to be an Afghan whose right hand lacked three fingers. The italics in the passage, which is a fantasy (or maybe not—in the play, truth is like a wisp of smoke), are Kushner’s:

"I ask him to tell me what had happened to his hand. And he says: I was with the Mujahideen, and the Russians did this. I was with the Mujahideen, and an enemy faction of Mujahideen did this. I was with the Russians, I was known to have assisted the Russians, I did informer’s work for Babrak Karmal, my name is in the files if they haven’t been destroyed, the names I gave are in the files, there are no more files, I stole bread for my starving family, I stole bread from a starving family, I profaned, betrayed, according to some stricture I erred and they chopped off the fingers of my hand. Look, look at my country, look at my Kabul, my city, what is left of my city? The streets are as bare as the mountains now, the buildings are as ragged as mountains and as bare and empty of life, there is no life here only fear, we do not live in the buildings now, we live in terror in the cellars in the caves in the mountains, only God can save us now, only order can save us now, only God’s Law harsh and strictly administered can save us now, only The Department for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice can save us now, only terror can save us from ruin, only neverending war, save us from terror and neverending war, save my wife they are stoning my wife, they are chasing her with sticks, save my wife save my daughter from punishment by God, save us from God, from war, from exile, from oil exploration, from no oil exploration, from the West, from the children with rifles, carrying stones, only children with rifles, carrying stones, can save us now. You will never understand. It is hard, it was hard work to get into the U.K. I am happy here in the U.K. I am terrified I will be made to leave the U.K. I cannot wait to leave the U.K. I despise the U.K. I voted for John Major. I voted for Tony Blair. I did not, I cannot vote, I do not believe in voting, the people who ruined my hand were right to do so, they were wrong to do so, my hand is most certainly ruined, you will never understand, why are you buying so many hats?"
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August 18, 2002
 
The Weblog Goes Visual!

I've owned a digital camera for more than two years, and I've had this blog for more than half a year, and finally I've figured out how to put them together. To mark the occasion, I've selected a photo (above) that I shot in the parliament building in Belgrade a day after it was stormed by protesters demanding the removal of Slobodan Milosevic. The graffitti, which is in Serbian, calls on Milosevic to perform a particular sexual act upon himself.

While we're on the subject, the picture that's below is of a ransacked perfume shop owned by Milosevic's much-hated son, Marko, who was known for the fast cars he drove and the spectacular crashes he got into with them. The graffitti suggests that he perform the previously-mentioned sexual act upon his father.


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August 16, 2002
 
Mark Morris Dance Group: Two Words Of Advice
Genius. Go.

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August 13, 2002
 
"High Fidelity" and "Love Thy Neighbor"

My book may not have been turned into a movie, but it had a cameo role in one, about which there has been some mystery, until now.

The backstory: there’s a scene in "High Fidelity" in which the character played by John Cusack is lying in bed with his girfriend, who will leave him for the guy who lives upstairs. The camera pans to the girlfriend, who is reading my book; you cannot miss the title because you are intended to see it. She will sleep with her neighbor and is reading a book entitled "Love Thy Neighbor"—get it?

"High Fidelity" is a smart movie (based on a great novel by Nick Hornby) that appeals, apparently, to readers of my book, because I received a lot of emails about its cameo. How had I arranged such fantastic product placement? I was as surprised as everyone else, and I’ve always wondered how