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James Fallows

James Fallows - James Fallows is a national correspondent for The Atlantic and has written for the magazine since the late 1970s. He has reported extensively from outside the United States, and once worked as President Carter's chief speechwriter. His latest book, China Airborne, will be published in May.
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James Fallows is based in Washington as a national correspondent for The Atlantic. He has worked for the magazine for nearly 30 years and in that time has also lived in Seattle, Berkeley, Austin, Tokyo, Kuala Lumpur, Shanghai, and Beijing. He was raised in Redlands, California, received his undergraduate degree in American history and literature from Harvard, and received a graduate degree in economics from Oxford as a Rhodes scholar. In addition to working for The Atlantic, he has spent two years as chief White House speechwriter for Jimmy Carter, two years as the editor of US News & World Report, and six months as a program designer at Microsoft. He is an instrument-rated private pilot. He is also now the chair in U.S. media at the US Studies Centre at the University of Sydney, in Australia.

Fallows has been a finalist for the National Magazine Award five times and has won once; he has also won the American Book Award for nonfiction and a N.Y. Emmy award for the documentary series Doing Business in China. He was the founding chairman of the New America Foundation. His two most recent books, Blind Into Baghdad (2006) and Postcards From Tomorrow Square (2009), are based on his writings for The Atlantic; he is at work on another book about China. He is married to Deborah Fallows, author of the recent book Dreaming in Chinese. They have two married sons.

Fallows welcomes and frequently quotes from reader mail sent via the "Email" button below. Unless you specify otherwise, we consider any incoming mail available for possible quotation -- but not with the sender's real name unless you explicitly state that it may be used. If you are wondering why Fallows does not use a "Comments" field below his posts, please see previous explanations here and here.
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Cheney on why not to invade Iraq, ca 1994

By James Fallows

Aug 15 2007, 11:31 PM ET

In case you haven't seen it elsewhere, and since I'm not sure this has yet been posted by my colleagues on the Atlantic's site, two links to Dick Cheney's jaw-dropping and incredible (because so lucid and prescient) comments about the folly of trying to occupy Iraq:

YouTube version (with branding from "Grand Theft Country") here.

MoveOn.org version (with pitch for funds) here.

Arguably the most important 82 seconds of political footage you'll see -- well, in quite a while.It's one thing to read quotes from G.H.W. Bush's book to the same effect. To see Cheney himself making the case and juxtapose that with the man we've come to know..... Too bad Charles Ferguson didn't have this for his movie.

Update: As I should have guessed, Andrew Sullivan actually mentioned this same video a couple of days ago. That's what he gets for cryptic references that don't come up in a search for "Cheney and video" or "Cheney and Iraq"!

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