James Fallows

James Fallows takes stock of Bush's effort to sell Americans on his "troop surge" plan.

Why the surge is a bad idea

Here is the clearer summary of the preceding post: Like many reporters, I admire David Petraeus and respect him for taking this new job in Iraq. But the very probability of failure that makes it mensch-like for Petraeus to be in this job makes it insane for the nation to double-down its bets in Iraq with a "surge." Democrats should refuse even to use that term, and instead call it what it is: "escalation." And they should not let it occur.

... who will soon take over military command in Iraq: Those who like or admire him, among them many members of the press (including me), think he is smart, imaginative, adaptable. Those who resent him, among them many of his officer-corps contemporaries, think he is too flashy, ostentatiously intellectual, publicity-minded, and above all ambitious, and that he would do anything for promotion and the next star. But he has now agreed to accept a job in which he is very, very likely to fail -- or to be seen as failing, two or three years from now.

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Just before New Year's Day it was back "home" to Shanghai, which was still in the sway of Asia's enthusiastic if wholly nonreligious Christmas mood and celebration. Through a fancy indoor gym in "Tomorrow Square," while I am using the spiffy ergometers and weight machines beneath holiday wreaths, waft the pop culture favorites of the season: Bing Crosby's White Christmas, Jose Feliciano's Feliz Navidad, Sleigh Ride Together by Leroy Anderson, and for an extra touch of campy surrealism, Eartha Kitt's Santa Baby. Then the one that makes me simply stop what I am doing and listen: Christmas Time is Here, from Vince Guaraldi's famous soundtrack -- I want to say, "score" -- for A Charlie Brown Christmas.

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This act makes neither America nor Iraq look good.

Domestic travel within Vietnam is hard, slow, inconvenient, and, well, hard. It is not as difficult as it was twenty years ago (to say nothing of eras before that), but it still is a chore. Yesterday's edition of the Viet Nam News contained the mournful disclosure that international visits to the country had risen only 3 per cent during 2006, even though this was the country's National Year of Tourism. But simply as landscape much of the country is beautiful. Completely apart from its historic, political, and now economic interest, sooner or later it will be a sought-after resort site. During the 1980s, the tourists we saw at the beaches were Bulgarians, Russians, and East Germans. Now they're mainly Europeans -- and here are two places they, and we, found worth the effort to reach:

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Social-search programs like Flickr and del.icio.us guide your Web browsing toward places you probably want to go.

No kidding: click on the link below only if you would like to see pictures of the Hanoi central market on Christmas day, with fresh dog meat arrayed for holiday eating. Not a joke. Here is the link. In any case, Happy New Year!

A week ago I was with my family in Hanoi, seeing (among other sites) the structure that the French called Maison Centrale, the Vietnamese called Hoa Lo Prison, and the American POW's like John McCain called the "Hanoi Hilton." Like most prisons it is a grim, intimidating building. Much of it has been demolished to make way for a modern high-rise-and-condo complex, but one wing has been preserved as a museum. Within the musuem are countless reminders of, mainly, the French colonialists' cruelty to their subject race, the Vietnamese. One wall has plaques with the names of hundreds of Vietnamese imprisoned and tortured there. Several other walls have photos of Vietnamese captives who died. There is a dark "interrogation room," frightening even to look into, plus specimens of the wires, canes, and electric generators used on captives within that room. There is also a chilling collection of artifacts from the American POWs, including the flight suit McCain was wearing when he was shot down. (But, to put it mildly, the hardships of the Americans are not the museum's dominant theme. The most extensive description of their situation is a ridiculous Soviet Life-style agitprop montage of the way they passed the time by teaching each other new crafts and singing soulfully about their home towns.) And, impossible to take your eyes off, is the prison's guillotine, flanked by photos of Vietnamese insurgents' heads in baskets. Any sentient American finds much to reflect upon in the Maison Centrale, including how torturers generally look in retrospect, no matter how "justified" their cause. In the wake of Saddam Hussein's execution, I find myself reflecting on that guillotine.

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Even though I spent the last six months of Jimmy Carter's 1976 presidential campaign as his #2 speechwriter (after Patrick Anderson), and even though I then spent the first two years of his Administration as chief of his speechwriting office (before Hendrik Hertzberg), I had very little to do with his inaugural address in 1977. The shaping of that speech was left in the hands of people much closer to the President-elect -- and as with all his major speeches, the most important touches were applied by Carter's own very distinctive prose-styling hands. I do remember, though, pushing hard for one idea about the speech:

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Vietnam's Highway One is still the country's main north-south road. Twenty years ago, when my wife and I rode a decrepit Soviet-made bus along Highway One from Hue, just south of the DMZ, all the way to Ho Chi Minh City (nee Saigon) in the south, the road was so sleepy that for miles on end it was covered with rice kernels, which farmers had placed on the asphalt to dry. Now the highway is bustling -- at least the stretch reaching five hours northward from Saigon, which my family recently rode, and at least with motorscooters, or "motos," today's universal transport vehicle of Vietnam. (Question for later consideration, and worry: the roads are already full of scooters. What will happen when the scooters become cars?) And in the vicinity of Saigon, Highway One is also loaded with churches, mainly Catholic. Many of the churches, in this Nativity season, had creches outside. But that's not the impressive point about the Christmas season in Vietnam and this region as a whole.

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Recently I mentioned that the Hobbesian nature of public life in China was bringing out parts of my character I would rather leave concealed. I have received a variety of responses, ranging from "stop whining" to "you don't know the half of it." Here is the strangest complementary anecdote, from an unexpected source.

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You think you can shove past me in the line at the airport or at the bank? Think again, buster.

Yes, presence in any foreign environment inevitably "improves" people. They learn about the new country, and their home country, and themselves, in ways they couldn't otherwise. They're jogged out of routines. They are exposed to different languages and approaches to life. And blah blah blah. Every day's exposure to China no doubt improves me in all those ways. But I realize that, in addition to pulverizing me in a physical sense, this China stint is making me worse as a human being.

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I am a fan of The Newseum, a museum of the news business that operated in the late 1990s in Arlington, Virginia and will soon open its gala new site on Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington. Its CEO, Charles Overby, is a nice man who has been generous to me.

But if what I have heard is true, the Newseum is about to make a mistake. It involves the Don Bolles "death car."

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Everything detailed and authoritative that needs to be said about this report has already been said, including by my friend and Atlantic colleague Robert Kaplan immediately after its release. In the set-up to his comments, Kaplan concisely outlines the way that people who held differing views before the war (as he and I did -- he and Michael Kelly, the two staff members with the deepest and most direct experience in the region, were the ones most passionately in favor of forced "regime change," while most others at the magazine were against it) can deal with the undisputed disaster that American presence in Iraq has become:

The mistakes made in Iraq since 2003 were so many and so serious that it is reasonable to argue that toppling Saddam Hussein was a wise decision, incompetently handled in its occupation phase. It is also possible to argue that the frequency and magnitude of the mistakes indicate a hubristic flaw in the concept of regime change itself, which I supported. Thus it is with humility and open-mindedness that I read the report of the Iraq Study Group.

Kaplan would, I assume, still make the first, "wise decision" argument; I was and am in the "hubristic flaw" camp. Because we can't re-run the invasion and occupation, we'll never know which of these views is correct. But obviously the outcome of this argument -- whether Iraq was a good idea badly handled, or a bad idea that incompetence made even worse -- will have a bearing on future American policy. That's for later. For now, three points: 1) There is essentially no chance that the Baker-Hamilton/Iraq Study Group report will be remembered for what it spends most time discussing: the next steps to take in Iraq.

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The Iraq Study Group may be remembered as the Walter Cronkite of this war.

Earlier I published a somewhat tetchy list of things I'd be hauling back to Shanghai after a trip to the US. Here are two more big ones: 5) Aspirin. Weirdly unavailable.

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