Off to the Middle East!

Now you've really done it. All your support of me and The Baghdad Project
has planted a seed -- and it's irreversible. I've decided to head back to
the Middle East to cover first the Rumi festival in Konya, Turkey, then more
of the story in Kurdistan, and then... Well, as we all know the Middle East
is and will continue to be full of stories, and independent reporting will
be as essential as ever.

Z interviewing last year in Iraq (2003)


This first trip will be exploratory: I'll be searching for an attractive
base from which to cover the area, possibly Amman, Cairo, Beirut, Istanbul,
or even Teheran, and will begin documenting, among many things, The Faces of
Islam.

I leave next Tuesday (Dec. 7th) and the first trip will be relatively
short (four months). I suspect I will be embedding with the military as early as Christmas and will send more news from Camp Victory.

I'm in major training on the fact and function of "Blogging" so I will be
able to keep everyone informed of my work on the ground. And I promise I
won't include the kind of details I did in my Iraq dispatches last year. I
scared myself half to death reading them recently, so I can just imagine how
they must have come across to concerned friends on this side of the pond. My
sincere apologies!