Kurt Andersen’s Holiday in Asia

As the war in Iraq began, public radio show host and novelist Kurt Andersen happened to be heading off on vacation to Asia with his wife and daughters. “We had been planning the trip for more than a year,” he writes in a thoughtful, ambitious and wide-ranging account in Sunday’s New York Times Magazine. “We had already bought the tickets and booked the rooms and read the guidebooks and got the inoculations, so despite the natural nervous impulse to hunker down, we decided to stick to our plans rather than postpone the trip until the girls’ summer vacation. In our damn-the-torpedoes holiday fashion, we made the same choice as the Bush administration—which had, in its own way, already bought the tickets, booked the rooms, read the guidebooks and got the inoculations and was dead set on going to Iraq this season, before the weather got too hot.”

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