Some Chicago Boyz know each other from student days at the University of Chicago. Others are Chicago boys in spirit. The blog name is also intended as a good-humored gesture of admiration for distinguished Chicago School economists and fellow travelers.
“[I]f ever there is an attack in US soil using a weapon of mass destruction, it would have originated from Pakistan”.
B. Raman, The Kaoboys of R&AW: Down Memory Lane.
(Book reviewed here and here.)
(“R&AW” = Research and Analysis Wing.)
(“Kaoboys” = People who worked for R&AW under its founder, R.N. Kao.)
[Obama’s] concept of a nuclear-proof world is patently unattainable, potentially dangerous, and inherently wrong. “I’m not naïve,” the president said. “But we go forward with no illusions.”
But he is, and he has.
Read the whole thing.
This is a very timely slice of grown-up thinking. Not a minute too soon.
Interesting quote from this op-ed concerning North Korea.
For years, Kim Jong Il was rated (by using various rankings of national problems and achievement) the worst ruler on the planet. But this year, Kim Jong Il came in third place, behind Zimbabwe (Robert Mugabe) and Sudan (Omar al Bashir). Things haven’t gotten any better in North Korea, they’ve just gotten much worse in Zimbabwe and Sudan.
WASHINGTON, DC – Flanked by the embattled President of Mexico, Felipe Calderon and the Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano, a weary looking President Barack Obama used a press conference to angrily denounce as “Alarmist and inflammatory” a recent report issued by the conservative Heritage Foundation that declared the massive chain of UN administered Mexican Refugee camps in Arizona, New Mexico and Texas as “a bottomless well for narco-insurgency” and “a threat to the territorial integrity of the United States”. The camps, home to at least 2.5 million Mexican nationals, are dominated by the “Zetas Confederales”, a loose and ultraviolent umbrella militia aligned with the feuding Mexican drug cartels that now control upwards of 80 % of Mexico.
President Obama’s political fortunes have been reeling recently in the wake of high profile incidents that include the kidnapping of his Special Envoy for Transborder Issues, former New Mexico governor Bill Richardson, and the car bombing assassination of popular California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger that killed 353 people in Sacramento last month. Both events have been tied directly to factions of Zetas “hardliners” who operate with impunity on both sides of the US-Mexican border. President Obama used the conference to point to the “clear and hold” COIN strategy that has recently restored order and even a degree of tourism to Las Vegas, once the scene of bloody street battles between Zetas, local street gangs and right-wing American paramilitary groups, as a sign of the success for his administration. Democratic leaders on Capitol Hill remain skeptical and say that it is likely that President Obama will face a primary challenge next year from Senator Jim Webb (D- Va), a former Secretary of the Navy in the Reagan administration, who called the president’s COIN strategy “The right course of action” but ” Two years too late”….
That fictional scenario above is offered as a thought experiment.
Pakistan is 173 million people, 100 nuclear weapons, an army bigger than the U.S. Army, and al-Qaeda headquarters sitting right there in the two-thirds of the country that the government doesn’t control. The Pakistani military and police and intelligence service don’t follow the civilian government; they are essentially a rogue state within a state. We’re now reaching the point where within one to six months we could see the collapse of the Pakistani state, also because of the global financial crisis, which just exacerbates all these problems. . . . The collapse of Pakistan, al-Qaeda acquiring nuclear weapons, an extremist takeover — that would dwarf everything we’ve seen in the war on terror today.