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.
Wretchard frames our problem:
In one sense, the prodigious American technological engine assures a near chronic imbalance between US military capability, which has increased exponentially and the slow, uncertain and labor intensive process of political transformation.
On the occasional days that I forgo the train and drive into downtown Chicago, I keep my radio dial on a constant, shifting rotation between four stations, news, news/talk, Stern, and NPR. People who think they know me often are surprised that I include NPR, but I like the diversity, and I really try to stay intellectually honest by listening to varied points of view.
Yesterday, I was listening when they played a piece by one of their commentators, Ben Walker. I listened as he told of B.D., the character from the Doonesbury comic strip, who has recently joined the armed forces and went to Iraq. Mr. Walker went on to say how B.D. was the only “person” that he personally knew in Iraq, and how B.D. had brought the war home for him, making him realize the sacrifices being made by brave, young and old men and women. I felt a little odd as he went on about B.D losing a leg in combat. The whole incident seemed to be greatly affecting Mr. Walker on an emotional level. I was not sure how to react to this, it seemed so superficial, being a cartoon, yet if it was the only way for this man to interpret reality, through the cartoon character, I guess it’s okay, right? As he came to the end of his piece, he said that, upon waking up from his ordeal, B.D. was very angry, and with a definitive tone in his voice, a tone that seemed to dismiss the whole idea of the conflict, Walker said “and I am angry too”. As I thought about what I had heard, I got a little angry as well. I was angry at the thought of a parent who had lost an actual, living, son or daughter, or a wife who had lost her husband, hearing this plaintive cry over a cartoon character. I planned to post on it last night, but it slipped my mind.
When I heard the news about Pat Tillman being killed today, it re-entered my mind. I am pissed off. I am sick of people like Walker, living their life through a cartoon character while myself and the rest of the country have blood and friends putting themselves on the firing line for us. I know the destructive, corrosive power of hate, but I hate Michael Moore and his ilk, people so selfish and stupid that they will gladly forgo confronting a festering global problem, increasing the odds that my kids will be in some future war in the godforsaken Middle East. And I am sick of losing the best and the brightest, the ones with the most guts and courage, lost in the defense of freedom for a miserable bunch who don’t deserve it. Ben Walker, I am angry too, but for a completely different reason.
I’ve installed a predictions quote board on the right side of this page. If you’re not familiar with the concept, this is a real time, real-money display of market odds percentages generated by people betting on various events — in this case political and world events that might interest readers of this blog. Odds generated by groups of people wagering their own money in this way have a generally good predictive record as compared to predictions made by individuals.
Click on the board to learn more about odds markets for particular events, or to open a trading account with the board’s sponsor. (Chicagoboyz receives a royalty for business generated via our board.)
Also, please let me know if you want me to add a particular market. The ones up there now are just a few that I thought would be generally interesting.
Carroll Andrew Morse makes a strong political argument for partitioning Iraq (via InstaPundit). The United States, by insisting on keeping Iraq together, has made Iraqi progress hostage to wreckers and terrorists who must be killed or coopted before a stable nation can be created. Morse says that we could make more headway by subdividing Iraq into self-governing sectors, so that the non-disfunctional regions and people are not held back by the thug minority. I agree, and think that we have made a big mistake by not considering such a course of action.
Reuven Brenner, in a December 2003 column, addresses the same problems as Morse does, dealing with the politics in historical context and also taking more account of economics. He frames the issue as a failure of the Wilsonian paradigm that we still use (and that wasn’t successful the first time around):
Wilson’s administration miscalculated. The policy prevented neither German nor communist aggression. Adherence to the abstract principle of “self-determination” also showed that the creation of small nations did not solve the problem of other smaller ones, which now found themselves within new borders. They were just called “minorities”, so as to deflect their claim to nationhood and self-determination. Language, too, can be an effective weapon.
Brenner suggests a federal solution that is similar to Morse’s. One issue that Brenner deals with explicitly, which Morse does not address, is oil. A unified Iraq likely means a central government controlling all of the revenue, which thus both encourages and facilitates centralization of power — as Saddam Hussein well knew. Brenner suggests that oil revenue be split proportionately among the various Iraqi ethnic groups.
With revenues from oil being widely dispersed, the chances of much funds going for rebuilding centralized military and police powers are diminished. “Power” has been dispersed and brought closer to the people. Whether or not such dispersion of financial clout will lead to developing – bottom up – a “canton”-like federal arrangement as in Switzerland, or lead to a breakup of Iraq along ethnic lines – time would tell. Both solutions seem more stable than what the world now faces.
If the tribes do not see eventual advantages of staying together, so be it. The separation of Slovakia from the Czech Republic did not end in any great disaster. If the ethnic groups now populating Iraq can’t get along, and will end up fighting, the resulting instability can be more easily contained, since none of the groups would have as much financial (oil-generated) clout as Saddam Hussein had. The best scenario would obviously be if these tribes – now having stakes in stability because of shared oil revenues administered by impartial outsiders (some Swiss, maybe?) – slowly find ways of making deals, and trade and live together. But even if one is prepared for the worst-case scenario – of the three major tribes not finding a modus vivendi and breaking up within the anyway artificial borders of what now defines Iraq – the harm is minimized.
“Ideas have long lives,” as Brenner puts it. Part of our problem is that our policy makers still rely by default on a sort of stagnant Wilsonianism as their model for dealing with multi-ethnic societies. Iraq, perhaps more than any other post-war crisis, demonstrates the limits of that approach. Brenner and Morse use different routes to arrive at similar policy responses to the crisis, and those responses make a lot of sense.
Robert Roy Britt has a great follow-up over on Space.com, covering the large meteorite that hit Chicago on the evening of Wed 26 Mar 03. In my posting over on Arcturus , I estimated its kinetic energy at seven-tenths of a kiloton. Now, thanks to the U of C’s own Steven Simon, I can perform the calculation more accurately.