Category Archives: Journalism

Latest Work

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Been a busy few days here in the old TIME house in Bagh­dad. I con­tributed to The Condi Doc­trine for the mag­a­zine, and “wrote a piece on Steven Vincent”:http://newyorkmagazine.com/nymetro/news/people/columns/intelligencer/12405/index.html for _New York Magazine_. This fol­lows on “my post from ear­lier this week”:http://www.back-to-iraq.com/archives/2005/08/steven_vincent.php.
Also: My Atom feed is cur­rently bro­ken. I’m work­ing on fix­ing that. I’m run­ning an MT beta ver­sion and all the bugs aren’t worked out yet. My own fault. Hope­fully will be fixed soon.

Splitting up Iraq?

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Here’s the lat­est entry on the con­sti­tu­tional wran­gling. Many of the Sun­nis on Iraq’s Con­sti­tu­tional Com­mit­tee “are opposed to any­thing other than a highly cen­tral­ized government”:http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1083936,00.html, which the Shi’ites and Kurds are equally opposed to. The Sun­nis see decen­tral­iza­tion, which is called “fed­er­al­ism” here, as a pre­lude to par­ti­tion­ing. The Kurds, how­ever, say if there’s no fed­er­al­ism, there’s going to be war.
I tell you, at some point Iraq’s Arabs are finally going to get fed up with the Kurds and their demands and tell them not to let the door hit them on their way out. Which, of course, would suit most Kurds just fine.

Democracy Now! short notice

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BAGHDAD–Sorry for the short notice, but I’ll be on the “Democ­racy Now!”:http://democracynow.org/ pro­gram some time between 8 a.m. and 9 a.m. EDT. (In other words, in about 45 mins.) I’m sup­posed to respond to Pres­i­dent Bush’s speech and give an update on what’s hap­pen­ing in Bagh­dad. The link above has a stream­ing link to the 8 a.m. show.
*UPDATE 29÷6÷05 16:53 +0300 GMT* Um, never mind. Their pro­duc­ers never called me. So much for that.

God quote?

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Hey, crack research team: Can any­one find me the exact quote of George W. Bush where he said some­thing along the lines of “God told me to invade Iraq”? Or some­thing like that. Or if that quote is bogus, can some­one show me? I can’t seem to find that quote.
thanks!
[UPDATE: Got the quote. Thanks! It was: “God told me to strike at al Qaeda and I struck them. And then he instructed me to strike at Sad­dam, which I did.”]
[UPDATE 2: And thanks for the sup­port­ing con­text. See­ing as it’s a trans­la­tion of a third-hand account, I don’t think I’ll be using this quote in my story.]