Bartle Bull

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Bartle B. Bull (b. 1970) is a Middle East expert. An author, magazine editor and journalist, Bull is editor of Middle East Monitor and foreign editor of Prospect, the leading political and cultural monthly magazine in the UK. Bull has done seven journalistic tours of duty in Iraq since the start of the insurgency in the spring of 2004 and is the only western journalist to have been embedded with the Mahdi Army in Iraq.

Bull has written from the Middle East for the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times, the Daily Telegraph, Foreign Policy, Die Welt and many other publications. His work, widely syndicated in Europe and the United States, has been featured in Corriere della Serra, the International Herald Tribune, the Los Angeles Times, and elsewhere. He appears frequently on radio and television, especially for the BBC, NPR, Fox News and Al Jazeera.

According to the Wall Street Journal, Bull's next book, Babylon, an account of the long relationship between Iraq, Iran and the West, is published in 2008 by Grove/Atlantic. According to his own website, other books by Bartle B. Bull include a child's book A Fox's Tale, and a non-fiction travel/adventure work Around the Sacred Sea: Mongolia and Lake Baikal on Horseback.

In the October 2007 issue of Prospect magazine, Bull argues that the Coalition's mission in Iraq has been accomplished. With most Sunni factions now seeking a deal, the big questions in Iraq have been resolved positively. The country remains one, it has embraced the ballot box and avoided all-out civil war. What violence remains is largely local and criminal. American troops will leave Iraq, Bull wrote, only 'when the Iraqis, through their elected leadership, tell them to'. This article, and its sister pieces in The Times and the Wall Street Journal, called "required reading in the Pentagon and elsewhere" are widely considered to be the most influential analytical writing about Iraq since the 2005 election cycle in that country.

Note: Bartle Bull's father is also named Bartle Bull (b. 1939). The elder Bartle Bull, an American of British ancestry, is both an attorney and a novelist. He graduated A.B. from Harvard University, attended Oxford University for graduate studies, and Harvard Law School. He is a member of both the Royal Geographical Society and the Explorers Club, and practices law in New York City. Bull's published fictional works include A Cafe on the Nile, China Star, The White Rhino Hotel, Shanghai Station, The Devil's Oasis, and Safari: A Chronicle of Adventure. He is also a former publisher of The Village Voice.

As the two Bartle Bulls are often mistaken the one for the other, the journalist son is often referred to as "Bartle B. Bull" using his middle initial to distinguish him from his novelist father.