Beyond the Book: Background information when reading Fiasco

Beyond the Book

This article relates to Fiasco

Thomas E. Ricks has been The Washington Post's senior Pentagon correspondent since 2000. Until the end of 1999, he held the same beat at The Wall Street Journal, where he was a reporter for seventeen years. A member of two Pulitzer Prize-winning teams for national reporting, he has reported on U.S. military activities in Somalia, Haiti, Korea, Bosnia, Kosovo, Macedonia, Kuwait, Turkey, Afghanistan, and Iraq. He is the author of Making the Corps and A Soldier's Duty.

Between 2003 and 2006 he made five trips to Iraq. He says that on his first trip in April/May 2003 he could walk the streets of Baghdad at night, albeit with caution; even in the summer of 2003 he felt safe driving to Tikrit, but "to do either of those things now [2006] would be suicidal. In January and February of [2006], Baghdad felt worse to me than Mogadishu did when I was there in 1993 or Sarajevo did when I was there a few years later."

Interesting Link: A July 15 2007 article by Thomas Ricks in the Washington Post.

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This "beyond the book article" relates to Fiasco. It originally ran in September 2006 and has been updated for the July 2007 paperback edition. Go to magazine.

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