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.
Most of you have seen or read that some Iranian boats buzzed a few of our ships that were steaming in international waters near the Straits of Hormuz. The US ships were a cruiser (USS Port Royal, CG 73), a destroyer (USS Hopper, DDG 70) and a frigate (USS Ingraham, FFG 61).
Here is some raw video of the incident:
Alec Rawls over at Error Theory has an interesting analysis concerning al Qaeda, Iraq, and the Democrats.
I think that Alec is substantially right about the situation in that the majority of the Iraqi population has turned against the terrorists, and they are currently hostile towards Islamic extremism. It also seems to me that the creation of a truly secular democracy (Alec refers to it as a “republic in the American sense”) is possible within the next decade, instead of in 30 or 40 years as I once thought.
But I’m not ready to agree completely with Mr. Rawls about some of the details when it comes to how this came about, mainly because I think whatever success we are currently enjoying is more due to mistakes made by the jihadis than a masterful stroke of genius on the part of the Bush administration. Our main advantage is that we can adapt when conditions change, something that our enemies seem to have a very hard time accomplishing.
But enough nitpicking. The essay is certainly though provoking if nothing else, and I think it would be worth your while to give it a read.
(Hat tip to Ace.)
Glenn links to a lengthy essay in The National Journal which calls into question the veracity of two studies. The studies in question were published in the prestigious British medical journal The Lancet, and they supposedly showed that civilian casualties had soared since the US led invasion. In fact, the studies claimed that civilian deaths were ten times greater than anyone had thought!
Our own Shannon Love picked the first of these studies apart when it was first published, and he received a lot of abuse in the comments for it. I’m glad to see that my fellow Chicago Boy is getting some small measure of vindication for all of his hard work, even if The National Journal is incredibly slow out of the starting gate.
[From Jonathan: A list of links to Shannon’s Lancet posts is here.]
Once the US squandered its post-Sept. 11 leverage with Pakistan it was left with only bad options for coping with the nuclear-armed jihadist incubating country. And these too, it has ignored in favor of the chimera of democracy and elections.
After Sept. 11, President George W. Bush declared war on the forces of global terror and their state sponsors. But as the years have passed since then, he has done more to lose the war than he has to win it simply by ignoring it.
Bhutto’s murder is not a sign that elections and democracy frighten al-Qaida and therefore must be pursued. It is a sign that the Taliban and al-Qaida – together with their supporters in the Pakistani military and intelligence services and Pakistani society as a whole – don’t like people who are supported by the US. Her assassination was yet another act of war by the enemies of the West against the West.
If democracy and freedom are the US’s ultimate aims in this war, the only way to achieve them is to first fight and win the war. Bhutto – like her Palestinian, Egyptian and Lebanese counterparts – was a sideshow.
It is funny how things work out sometimes.
I am a big fan of reading about armored cars and other types of scouting vehicles from the WW2 era. There have been millions of pages written about the famous tank battles like Kursk. On top of that, there are many, many picture books that feature WW2 tanks. A few subjects that don’t get quite as much attention are armored cars, scout vehicles, and transports. Heck, Patton once said that his greatest weapon was the good old two ton truck.