Totten's work has appeared in
The Wall Street Journal,
The New York Times, the
New York Daily News,
Commentary, and others. In July 2007, Totten traveled to
Baghdad to
embed with several
U.S. Army units before transitioning to
Anbar province and embedding with
U.S. Marines. In late 2007 he embedded with U.S. Marines in Fallujah, and he embedded again with the U.S. Army in Baghdad in late 2008. Totten won the 2007
Weblog Award for Best Middle East or
Africa Blog, he won it again in 2008, and was named "Blogger of the Year" in 2006 by
The Week magazine for his dispatches from the
Middle East.
Ideology In comments on his own website from 2008 Totten described himself as a "weird combination of liberal, libertarian, and neocon" and a politically centrist. He believed that the critics of the war in Iraq who noted the lack of progress from 2004 to 2006 were correct while the Bush administration was wrong. He supported the 2007 'surge' strategy. Totten was briefly a
Libertarian during the 1990s but became a
Democrat afterwards, though he has previously said that he was never fully content with being a Democrat and has considered returning to the Libertarians.
Funding Totten describes himself as an "independent journalist." Most of his trips—to
Iraq,
Lebanon,
Turkey,
Israel,
Egypt,
Libya,
Bosnia,
Kosovo,
Georgia, and several other places—are paid for out of his own pocket, although he has also accepted funding from the
government of Azerbaijan, the
American Jewish Committee and the Lebanese pro-western
March 14 alliance for trips to
Azerbaijan,
Israel, and
Lebanon, respectively. ==Personal life==