UCI Inaugural Dialogue on Democracy and Islam

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School of Social Sciences
Center for the Study of Democracy

Invites you to attend the

Inaugural Dialogue on Democracy and Islam

With Guest Lecture by

RAJIV CHANDRASEKARAN

Assistant Managing Editor,
The Washington Post

IMPERIAL LIFE IN THE EMERALD CITY

Thursday, November 16, 2006

4:30-5:00 p.m. Book Signing in Social Science Plaza
5:00 p.m. Lecture
Social Science Plaza A, Room 1100

FREE AND OPEN TO THE PUBLIC

Rajiv Chandrasekaran is an assistant managing editor of The Washington Post. From April 2003 to October 2004, he was The Post's bureau chief in Baghdad, where he was responsible for covering the American occupation of Iraq, leading a team of American correspondents, and supervising more than two dozen Iraqi staffers. He also spent much of the six months leading up to the war in Baghdad, reporting on the United Nations weapons-inspections process and the build-up to the conflict.

He currently heads The Post's Continuous News department, which provides breaking news stories to the paper's Web site, washingtonpost.com.

He took a sabbatical from The Post in 2005 to serve as the journalist in residence at the International Reporting Project at the Johns Hopkins School for Advanced International Studies in Washington and as a public policy scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center in Washington.

He has appeared on National Public Radio and numerous television programs and stations, including the News Hour, CNN, Fox News, Nightline, NBC Nightly News, MSNBC, and the BBC.

Before the U.S.-led war in Iraq, he was The Post's Cairo bureau chief. Prior to that assignment, he was The Post's Southeast Asia correspondent, based in Jakarta, Indonesia. In the months following September 11, 2001, he was part of a team of Post reporters who covered the war in Afghanistan. He has been a foreign correspondent for The Post since 1999. Prior to that, he was the paper's Washington-based national technology correspondent.

He joined The Post in 1994 as a reporter on the Metropolitan staff. A native of the San Francisco Bay Area, he holds a degree in political science from Stanford University, where he was editor in chief of The Stanford Daily.

In the October 10, 2006 edition of the New Yorker, Chandrasekaran's Imperial Life in the Emerald City was reviewed as follows:

"This revealing account of the postwar administration of Iraq, by a former Baghdad bureau chief for the Washington Post, focuses on life in the Green Zone, the American enclave in central Baghdad. There the Halliburton-run (and Muslim-staffed) cafeteria served pork at every meal-a cultural misstep typical of the Coalition Provisional Authority, which had sidelined old Arab hands in favor of Bush loyalists. Not only did many of them have no previous exposure to the Middle East; more than half had never before applied for a passport. While Baghdad burned, American officials revamped the Iraqi tax code and mounted an anti-smoking campaign. Chandrasekaran's portrait of blinkered idealism is evenhanded, chronicling the disillusionment of conservatives who were sent to a war zone without the resources to achieve lasting change."

For additional information please call 924 824-2904 or visit http://www.democ.uci.edu