Law v. OilThe 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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