The Intercept
September 10, 2014
Beheading is barbaric. The men of the Islamic State who executed James Foley and Steve Sotloff are monsters. Yet their monstrosity does not fully explain our fury over their beheading videos, or the exhortations we have heard to not share or distribute the harrowing ...
The New Yorker
April 9, 2013
Guess what? The war in Iraq had a bright side. It created the Arab Spring.
That is the theory that proponents of the invasion are peddling on the tenth anniversary of the toppling of the statue of Saddam Hussein in Baghdad, on April 9, 2003. They are trying to persuade whoever ...
The New York Times
March 14, 2013
(The following story ran on the NYT’s At War blog)
With the invasion of Iraq just weeks away, Lt. Tim McLaughlin began a military ritual that dates back to Homer. He started a war diary. It was not a blog or e-mails sent from his waiting-to-invade base in the Kuwaiti ...
Sunday Times Magazine (London)
March 3, 2013
A few years ago, a former marine named Tim McLaughlin drove to New Hampshire in his red pickup to visit his parents’ farmhouse, which is where he stored his gear from Iraq, among which were his war diaries. A marine decal was on one ...
The Atlantic
December 13, 2012
One of the most dramatic scenes in Zero Dark Thirty, the new film by Kathryn Bigelow and Mark Boal, takes place in a conference room where the CIA team hunting Osama bin Laden is lambasted by its boss, played by Mark Strong. “There’s no working group coming ...
The Nation
May 9, 2012
The phrase “war on terror” is rarely heard these days. Our fight in Iraq ended last year with the pullout of the remaining troops. Combat forces are set to be withdrawn from Afghanistan in 2014, and their fade-away has been highlighted by the fact that more private contractors ...
The New Yorker
January 3, 2011
On April 9, 2003, Lieutenant Colonel Bryan McCoy, commander of the 3rd Battalion 4th Marines, awoke at a military base captured from the Iraqis a few miles from the center of Baghdad, which was still held by the enemy. It had been twenty days since the ...
Foreign Policy
September 8, 2009
Across the globe, oil is invoked as an agent of destiny. Oil will make you rich, oil will make you poor, oil will bring war, oil will deliver peace, oil will shape our world as much as the glaciers did in the Ice Age.
But how?
Oil is not a machine that can be disassembled ...
Slate
July 18, 2008
I hate Skittles. I perfected this dislike while covering the invasion of Iraq, because the gummy pills of sugar and fruit were included in the MREs fed to soldiers, Marines, and journalists who were racing to Baghdad in 2003. On the continuum of foods I can’t stand, they are ...
