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.
Thomas Sowell on American Collapse: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5
Journalism Warning Labels (via Rachel).
Caroline Glick’s excellent recent column on Iraq, Iran and US strategy.
Baseball Crank on deficits and spending. This is very well done.
Der Spiegel just reported the following:
German experts have confirmed the authenticity of photographs that purport to show PKK fighters killed by chemical weapons. The evidence puts increasing pressure on the Turkish government, which has long been suspected of using such weapons against Kurdish rebels. German politicians are demanding an investigation.
American built M60A3 Tanks in Turkish Army Service
If this pans out as true, and not a Leftist German-PKK disinformation exercise, expect two things —
1) The NATO Alliance as we know it to dissolve.
2) Turkey will go nuclear within a couple of years.
The age of Catalytic Nuclear Proliferation will be upon us, with lethal gas as an accompaniment.
Update: Gatewaypundit is on the case
What was determinative in America’s victorious 2001 and 2008 – 2013 Afghanistan military campaigns was the will of the American people to keep the Afghanistan from becoming a terrorist base again. Unlike Vietnam, but like the Second World War, this war was started by a surprise attack on the American people at home. Thus the America people’s definition of “victory” was security at home, whatever games America’s ruling elite of the time were doing to either make the goal more or less than that definition.
This American determination was aided by two things. The will of the Afghans not to be ruled by foreign Islamist backed drug warlords and the terrain of Southern Afghanistan.
The much missed at the time fact was that America’s military was not “colonizing” Afghanistan for the West. It was _re-establishing_ the old cultural order of Afghan tribal elders against the drug trade and the students of the foreign Saudi-Wahabi Islamist schools in Pakistan and the wider Muslim world.
American Special Forces Hunting Taliban on Horseback
The Pashtun Drug Warlords, the Taliban and Al-Qaeda were the “power challengers” with guns and cash who were atomizing local Afghan tribal culture and cutting that culture off from both welcome modern medicine and wireless telecommunications, not the Americans.
In Britain today, hating Israel has become a valid criminal defense. This week five criminal defendants charged with destroying property valued at some $285,000 at the EDO MBM arms factory in Brighton during a January 2009 break-in were found innocent of all charges. They were found innocent despite the fact that all five admitted to having committed the crime….The jury found the five innocent because the jurors accepted as a valid defense the defendants’ claim that they vandalized the EDO MBM plant because they wanted to prevent Israel from carrying out war crimes in Gaza. EDO MBM does business with the IDF, therefore, the defendants claimed and the jury agreed, it deserved to be attacked. In finding as they did, the jurors were acting in accordance with the guidance they received from the presiding judge…What this verdict shows is that in British courts, hatred of Israel has become a license to break the law.
I knew things had gotten rather strange in the UK, but this is unbelievable.
The attitudes of “progressivism,” incubated largely in Western universities, have now become a serious threat to the survival of Western civilization.
via Bookworm
Iran has transferred an advanced radar system to Syria. According to the WSJ report, this has at least three strategic implications. First, it helps to protect Hezbollah from Israeli retaliatory strikes. Second, it makes more difficult an Israeli attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities. Third, it improves the accuracy of Hezbollah missile attacks, including potential SCUD attacks on Israeli cities. (Presumably by allowing observation of the missile trajectory up through its final stages so that the aim of succeeding missiles can be adjusted.)
WSJ says that the transfer was a “blow to U.S. strategy on Damascus.” It also should have been a totally predictable one.