Abu Musab al-Zarqawi

New York Times Iraq correspondent Dexter Filkins will be writing a book about his experience covering terrorism in the Middle East. Filkins' agent Amanda Urban at ICM completed the deal on June 6 with Knopf.

"It'll be less a reported book than a Dispatches," Urban said by phone of Filkins' proposal, referring to Michael Herr's seminal account of the Vietnam war. "Dexter's book will be more impressionistic. He's covered terrorism in one place or another for nine years. He's watched the Twin Towers fall, he's been in Afghanistan and Iraq. It will be a recounting of those experiences...It's no secret that a lot of Iraq books haven't succeeded. The idea here is to write a book that will be an evergreen, that will rise above just an account of the war."

Filkins was in New York last week meeting with publishers before returning to Iraq on Sunday, three days before American forces killed Al Qaeda in Iraq leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.

In September, Filkins will leave the Times' Baghdad bureau and begin a Nieman Fellowship at Harvard University, where he will write his book. Knopf editor Jonathan Segal, who bought the proposal for six figures, didn't return a call seeking comment. Urban declined to comment on the advance.

--Gabriel Sherman

In the cable-news battle over the al-Zarqawi death, CNN has been tops today, by demonstrating real journalistic values—i.e., a little honest detachment and analysis. To its great credit, the network aired an interview with Nir Rosen, author of In the Belly of the Green Bird, in which Rosen made the following points:

The focus on Zarqawi as the ringleader is a "myth" created by the U.S. forces. His killing represents no real turning point. "Unfortunately there is no good news in Iraq. The civil war began there in 2005." That is the only real dynamic in Iraq: a fight for dominance between Sunni and Shi'a with militias carrying out ethnic cleansing. The civil war throughout Iraq will only intensify. As for the green zone, it is a "theater for people from outside Iraq."

"By invading Iraq, the Bush administration created a self-fulfilling prophecy: Iraq has now replaced Afghanistan as a magnet, training ground, and operational base for jihadist terrorists, with plenty of American targets to shoot at. The tenuous prewar connection between the Jordanian jihadist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and the Ba'athists in Iraq has now grown into a full-scale alliance, fed by mutual resentment of the U.S. occupation."

--Francis Fukuyama, America at the Crossroads,2006

For obvious reasons, the Papacy is not a hereditary office.  read more »

Beyond the next peace is always some further problem.  read more »