Rajiv Chandrasekaran is a senior correspondent and associate editor. He was The Post’s national editor and has served as an assistant managing editor. He was bureau chief in Baghdad for the first two years of the Iraq war. He also has been a correspondent in Cairo and Southeast Asia. He the author of Imperial Life in the Emerald City, a best-selling account of the troubled American effort to reconstruct Iraq. A graduate of Stanford University, he joined The Post in 1994 as a reporter on the metropolitan staff.