February 11, 2008

Washington Post military correspondent to talk about war in Iraq

Thomas E. Ricks will present "The Iraq War as a Failure of the American System?" at 8 p.m. in Stewart Center's Loeb Playhouse as part of the Sears Lecture Series. Ricks, who has covered the U.S. military for almost two decades, is author of "FIASCO: The American Military Adventure in Iraq." He has worked at the Washington Post since 2000 and before then covered the same beat at the Wall Street Journal for 17 years.

He was part of a Wall Street Journal team that won the Pulitzer Prize for national reporting in 2000 for a series of articles on how the U.S. military might change to meet the new demands of the 21st century. Ricks also was part of a Washington Post team that won the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for reporting about the beginning of the U.S. counteroffensive against terrorism.

He also wrote "Making the Corps," which won Washington Monthly's political Book of the Year award. He has written on defense matters for the Atlantic Monthly and other publications. His first novel, "A Soldier's Duty," about the U.S. military intervening in Afghanistan, was published by Random House in June 2001.

Born in Massachusetts in 1955, he grew up in New York and Afghanistan and graduated from Yale in 1977. He now lives in Silver Spring, Md., with his wife and children.

The last Sears Lecture Series speaker is Robert Pape, a professor of political science at the University of Chicago. He will present "What's Wrong with the War on Terrorism?" at 8 p.m. March 26 in Stewart Center's Fowler Hall.

The Sears Lecture Series is sponsored by the Department of Political Science, which is housed in Purdue's College of Liberal Arts.

The biennial series is named for the late Purdue historian Louis Martin Sears, who was a faculty member in the then-joint Department of History and Political Science from 1920 until his retirement in 1956. Sears specialized in diplomatic history and biography and was the author of numerous books. The history and political science departments alternately sponsor the lecture series bearing his name.

Writer: Amy Patterson Neubert, (765) 494-9723, apatterson@purdue.edu

Source: Louis René Beres, (765) 494-4189, lberes@purdue.edu 

Purdue News Service: (765) 494-2096; purduenews@purdue.edu

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