Category: Blog

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 ...  (Read more)

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

Gilles Kepel’s ideas about the Middle East have always intrigued me, and David Ignatius, in today’s Washington Post, writes an opinion piece about Kepel’s newest book. The opinion piece is worth ...  (Read more)

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.

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 ...  (Read more)

Gizmodo, the tech website, wanted to know what gadgets journalists carry in warzones. Here’s my answer.

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.

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 ...  (Read more)

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 ...  (Read more)