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Getting out of Iraq: What's the right idea when all ideas are bad?
For much of the last five years I have been writing about the buildup to the Iraq war, the management of the war, and the war's likely consequences. Apart from this article in the Atlantic a year and a half ago, I have avoided writing or saying much about what the United States should do next in Iraq. About the general management of the "war on terror" -- sure, no problem, as shown in one article from early in 2005 and another from a few months ago. But as for the "best" way to deal with the worst strategic error in modern American history, I've had nothing useful to say.
There was a natural but not so high-minded reason I felt this way. Having been against this venture from the start, I had no stomach for coming up with "solutions" to problems that I thought ahead of time were likely to prove insoluble.
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To and from Hongqiao: Dickensian details of daily Chinese life
Sunday, November 25, 10:30 am: Taxi from downtown Shanghai to Hongqiao airport, the older, closer-in airport that handles most domestic flights. (Versus the newer, fancier, more distant Pudong Airport. Pudong is the equivalent to Dulles, O'Hare, or JFK; Hongqiao is National, Midway, or LaGuardia.) Halfway through the 30-minute trip, on the freeway portion of the drive, I notice that the car is drifting from side to side across lanes as it travels. Nothing so unusual about that. But this feels somehow different - and I look at the rearview mirror and see that the driver has fallen asleep.
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Podcast of Blind Into Baghdad interview
Recently posted here.
Atlantic tech column about Vista and Office2007
Is here on the Atlantic's web site.
China article in the Atlantic
It is here, subscribers only. Subscribe!
Dog years and China years
Thirty years ago I was working on the Carter presidential campaign. That meant going to bed about 2am, getting up about 4:30 am, and cranking out speeches in all the hours in between, via typewriters (yes) while on buses and airplanes. This was the time when I learned that coffee and Coke were the two staple foods. At a campaign stop in Los Angeles after several months of this existence, I ran into Anthony Lewis, reporting on the campaign in his role as columnist for the New York Times. I had met him a few years earlier. "You look terrible!" he said. I was then in my mid-20s, but I told him that I realized I was getting one year older each day on the campaign.
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Improbable but true: James Webb-James Fallows joint article on the draft
I had known Jim Webb for about a year, and had worked for the Atlantic for about the same amount of time, when I proposed to him early in 1980 that we jointly undertake a project for the magazine. The results, published for the first time on the Atlantic's web site, are here (Webb's article) and here (mine); the back story follows.
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Transcript of interview for PBS documentary on Iraq
Now posted online here (and text appended after the break).
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Other people's celebrities
A few weeks ago I was on a China Eastern flight from Shanghai to Changsha, in Hunan province. I was in a window seat. The two people next to me, and the three on the other side of the aisle in the same row, were a standard group of hip-looking Chinese in their 20s.
When we trudged off the plane and through the baggage area, I was amazed to see a full press gaggle, complete with TV cameras and civilian onlookers, whose members began asking questions, shooting off flash pictures, and screaming in delight when the people in my row came into view. Apparently they were famous, and not by a little!
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Election-watch 2006: Shanghai edition
I have met exactly one person in China who professed admiration for George W. Bush. This was a retired senior PLA officer, no softie himself, who said he respected Bush because "he is tough man." The more common Chinese view resembles what Americans have gotten used to hearing in England, France, Japan, [choose your country] since the run-up to the Iraq war late in 2002. People think the Bush administration has been too high-handed, too ham-handed, and a lot of other things that resemble the way Democrats in America have felt. The day after the midterm elections I was talking to a Chinese academic who said that what Iraq really needed was a strong-willed leader. He got a twinkle in his eye and said, "Why not send them Bush!"
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Yet another very good book
China Shakes the World, by James Kynge, for many years the FT's correspondent in Beijing. Given his obvious immersion in and affinity for the culture, it is the more impressive when Kynge takes a hard line at the end: The rise of a power that is in the world trading system, but not really of it, poses problems for everyone else.
This is a line of analysis I am familiar and sympathetic with -- as it applies to Japan. I have not yet reached that point about China. Not sure why, or whether it's just a matter of time. In any case, this is valuable book.
A mystery of driving explained
In an article in the December issue of the Atlantic, which is published abnormally late for reasons I don't fully grasp, I mention that the traffic-death rate per mile driven is roughly ten times higher in China than in North America. Nothing so shocking about that:
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China slideshow at the Atlantic, plus Slate
A narration of daily life in Shanghai and Beijing here, at the Atlantic's site. Of course accompanied by my wife Deb's "Diarist" this week in Slate.
"Talking like a pirate" in Chinese
For later discussion: the pluses and minuses of studying Chinese versus Japanese. The Cliff's Notes version is that Chinese is on the whole "easier" (streamlined grammar, one pronunciation per character versus many), but is significantly harder for Westerners to pronounce. The Japanese sounds are pretty straightforward. The Chinese ones are not.
Oddball pronunciation issue: there is one sound in Chinese, especially in Beijing-accent, that seems entirely impossible -- until you think of the one English sound it resembles. That is the "talking like a pirate" sound. No one knows quite how to spell it -- "arrrrrrrhh!" perhaps -- but everyone knows what it the sound is, and how to produce it. I don't know of any part of "normal" English that this sound resembles, but as long as I think "pirate," I'm OK.
A break from the election: why beta software is bad
All my adult life I've loved playing with beta software. I like it because -- well, it's new. You get a preview of the tools and tricks you'll soon be able to use. You can in effect look over the software designers' shoulders and see what problems they're trying to solve.
But here is what I have learned over the last ten weeks, through the worst experience of my 25+ years of using personal computers: be very, very afraid of beta software for any functions you need for actual work.
As mentioned earlier, the disaster involved the upcoming releases of Microsoft Office 2007 and Microsoft Vista.
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Has Bush been smart all along?
Maybe it's just because the event happened between 2am and 3am China time. But I listened with mounting amazement to President Bush's post-election press conference on Wednesday.
It was not simply the tone of relative reasonableness and contrition -- or as close to it as we've ever heard in public from this man -- that was so surprising. Contrition? What the transcript renders as "It was a thumping," and what was actually delivered as "It was a thumpin'," was more frank-sounding than anything the President has ever said about, well, Iraq.
The amazing aspect was that this man sounded smart.
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Proud to be an American, chapter 12,745
Election Day 2006 was a very good day for American democracy, for obvious reasons: it showed that dozens of Congressional districts could in fact be "in play" despite the well-known excesses of gerrymandering, and it was long-sought proof that there is, finally, some accountability for gross failures of judgment, execution, competence, and vision. After running two gubernatorial campaigns in Texas and one presidential campaign (his first) on themes of accountability, responsibility, and facing up to mistakes, George W. Bush has imposed almost none of it on his administration. Two word proof: Donald Rumsfeld.
(Don't remember the "accountability" theme? It was how he polished off Ann Richards in their first debate back in 1994, as described here.)
Also: to be free at last of the phrase, "the genius of Karl Rove." Not to mention, "the Republican ground game." Hallelujah.
And: to know that however the Virginia recount turns out, George Allen is never going to be a presidential nominee.
Here is a less obvious reason that it matters: Life is about to become dramatically more pleasant, positive, and effective for Americans in their dealings with every other part of the world.
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What's wrong with travel, part 973
What I crammed into my carry on bag on my recent slog from China to America and back:
Everyone recognizes the gear:
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What's wrong with travel, part 972
This is why, after one crack at it, I won't be doing a lot of small-airplane flying in China any more. Here is how a Cirrus SR-22 got fueled up at the main airport in Changsha, capital of Hunan province. (Man in the truck is Peter Claeys, intrepid Cirrus salesman for China. Other men, including the luckless one working the siphon, are involved in local aviation.)
Further travel adventures to be reported in the Atlantic.
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Another book well worth reading
John Pomfret's China Lessons, mentioned earlier, is a subtle and insightful account of China's political evolution and devolution. Timothy Clissold's Mr. China is a subtle and insightful account of China's political and economic evoution and devolution -- and is absolutely hilarious as well. Two aspects of life that loom larger and larger in my own experience are central themes here. One is what I think of as the "paradox of slipshodness."
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