The Rolling Stone reporter on his blockbuster articles, how the generals pushed Obama into a war he didn’t want to fight, and the Pentagon’s effort to tear down the wall between PR and propaganda.
Photograph courtesy Lucian ReadOn January 17, 2007, Michael Hastings was a twenty-six-year-old
Newsweek reporter stationed in Baghdad when a convoy carrying his fiancée, Andrea Parhamovich, was ambushed by Sunni extremists. Parhamovich had taken a position with the National Democratic Institute in Baghdad to be closer to Hastings, and she was returning from a training session that would help her promote democracy. She and three bodyguards were killed in the attack. While the senseless nature of her death shattered Hastings—there were no combatants in the convoy—it produced a need to convey the experience. “It’s one thing to hear about all these deaths during war,” he says, “it’s another to go through the process of having your loved one get killed.” His 2008 book,
I Lost My Love in Baghdad: A Modern War Story, recounts that wrenching process.
In the two years prior to Parhamovich’s death, Hastings had grown increasingly dubious about the Iraq war. He was there during the worst of the sectarian violence, and he watched as the country descended into a morass of bloodshed, chaos and corruption. “Three thousand bodies were dropping a month,” he says of that period, “with multiple car bombs exploding every morning.” Witnessing the devastation, Hastings wondered how any future benefits could ever justify the terrible price. Meanwhile, generals were telling him that everything was fine, that the Iraqi police were in control. “There’s a reason for my cynicism,” he says, “and it’s not because I like drinking a latte.”
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