Anyone checked out ChristopherHitchens.com lately?
Author: Peter Maass
I was born and raised in Los Angeles. In 1983, after graduating from the University of California at Berkeley, I went to Brussels as a copy editor for The Wall Street Journal/Europe. I left the Journal in 1985 to write for The New York Times and The International Herald Tribune, covering NATO and the European Union. In 1987 I moved to Seoul, South Korea, where I wrote primarily for The Washington Post. After three years in Asia I moved to Budapest to cover Eastern Europe and the Balkans. I spent most of 1992 and 1993 covering the war in Bosnia for the Post.
Afghanistan’s Black Hawk Down
Today’s Washington Post has a detailed reconstruction of the March battle in which seven American soldiers were killed during Operation Anaconda in Afghanistan. An excellent story.
A Bosnian Anniversary
It’s hard to believe, but ten years ago to this day I filed my first story about the war in Bosnia. Feels like yesterday, and a lifetime ago.
The Best Foreign Affairs Columnist
When I was an intern at The Washington Post, the foreign editor was Jim Hoagland, a Francophile who treated me well, perhaps because I lived in Paris for a year and he assumed I loved the French as much as he did (I did not). Hoagland is now the Post’s principal foreign affairs columnist, ...
Required Reading in Pakistan
One of the delights of reporting in Pakistan—or India, for that matter—is that English-language newspapers are prevalent and important and, in many cases, enjoyable reads (both the truth and the English language are stretched in exciting ways). The crisis between Pakistan and India has led me ...
The Long Arm Of The Hague, Cont.
Ed Vulliamy, who filed the first eyewitness dispatches about Serb-run prison camps in Bosnia, writes in The Observer that journalists should testify at war crimes trials. “I believe there are times in history–as ...
Thomas Friedman’s Chutzpah
Why can’t Thomas Friedman say “I was wrong”? His column on Sunday argues, rightly, that President Bush’s war on terrorism fails to embrace non-military strategies that would help ensure America’s security. ...
The End Is Not Near, Cont.
Can the United Nations do anything right? The surprising answer, in light of the U.N.’s failures in Bosnia, Somalia, and Rwanda during the 1990s, may be “yes.” East Timor’s new government takes over from the U.N. on Monday, and as The ...
The End Is Not Near
Two years ago Sierra Leone was a symbol of everything that was wrong in Africa. It was suffering through a civil war that was notable, in its brutality, for the prevalance of men, women and children whose arms were chopped off by doped-up rebels wearing tutus and wigs. U.N. peacekeepers were nearly ...
The Wrong Target?
The terrorists who killed 11 Frenchman in Karachi, using a car bomb outside the Sheraton Hotel, selected a target that could lead to their undoing. The Frenchmen were engineers overseeing construction of a submarine for ...