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.
Joe Katzman graciously invited us to join his Spirit of America Blogger Challenge team. I wasn’t sure our doing so would be fair to people who have already donated via the ChicagoBoyz team. However, Joe & Co. are raising money, within the context of the Spirit of America Challenge, for a highly specific — and promising — purpose: creation of Arabic-language blogging software. So I put a link to Joe’s donation page next to our own donation link in the blog heading.
Chicago Boyz has signed up with the Spirit of America, a worthy cause if there ever was one. Spirit of America provides resources to Americans serving in Iraq and Afghanistan who have organized a number of helpful projects. Read more at the Spirit of America website, or click here or on the “FRIENDS OF IRAQ” graphic to donate through this blog.
So say the foreign ministers of Egypt and Jordan (via Drudge). Sounds like wishful thinking on their part.
Given who the messengers are, the message I am taking from all this is that the sooner Iraq holds elections, the better. The worst thing we could do would be to reward terrorists and non-democratic Arab regimes by postponing the election. It would be nice if Iraq could even advance the scheduled date, just to make its enemies squirm. For dictatorships, violence is just another business tool but elections are terrifying.
Bring on the elections in Iraq and elsewhere.
That’s how Reuven Brenner, in this recent column, characterizes the struggle between the democratic West and Islamic fundamentalism. Brenner’s argument is interesting.
It is easy to criticize both grandiose thesis and narrow ones. To come up with a different way of perceiving the events and offer solutions is a bit harder. Yet this brief does just that. It shows that today’s conflict between Islamic groups and the West, as well as within Islamic societies, can be viewed as one between “mobile” and “immobile” civilizations, whose members can be found in every society. What distinguishes the US is that it has far more people sharing the outlook of a “mobile civilization” than any other country. And what characterizes many Islamic countries is that they have a large number of people sharing the values of an “immobile” civilization. “Relativist” orthodoxy notwithstanding, one point I make is that although one can understand the values and ideals of “immobile societies”, as fitting certain situations, there cannot be a compromise between these two civilizations. Today’s circumstances – demographic in particular – require moves toward “mobility”.