The other night I went to see Dexter Filkins talk about his new book The Forever War at the Los Angeles Central Library, and he was joined by WSJ writer Farnaz Fassihi (Waiting for an Ordinary Day) for a fascinating, often disturbing conversation about living and dodging bombs in Iraq.
Dexter had just returned a few days earlier from another stint in Baghdad, where the NY Times bureau is a fortress guarded by a rooftop militia armed with machine guns, where massive concrete blast walls keep sworn enemies apart, where our government is now paying insurgents 300 bucks a head – an astonishing $30 million a month – to take a break from the killing. That’s the Surge in action. Dexter had no easy answers about the country’s future or how the U.S. involvement there might end: “You broke it you bought it.”
Here’s a recent Q&A with Dexter, his essay at Powells, and a story about Farnaz Fassihi and her candid 2004 email read around the world.
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