{"id":1994,"date":"2005-04-07T20:11:16","date_gmt":"2005-04-08T03:11:16","guid":{"rendered":""},"modified":"2005-04-07T20:11:16","modified_gmt":"2005-04-08T03:11:16","slug":"a-friendly-wager","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/2005\/04\/07\/a-friendly-wager\/","title":{"rendered":"A Friendly Wager"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=http:\/\/www.justinlogan.com\/justinlogancom\/2005\/04\/instapundit_wat.html#trackback>Justin Logan<\/a> writes:<\/p>\n<ul>[P]rofessor Pundit <a href=http:\/\/instapundit.com\/archives\/022264.php>compares and contrasts<\/a> how friggin&#8217; awesome things are in Iraq now with how scary and Hobbesian&#8230;er&#8230;<I>France<\/I> has become. Reynolds wonders: <\/p>\n<p>&#8220;Will France improve as much in the coming year as Iraq has in the past year? Doubtful.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>From the telling of Instapundit and guys like <a href=http:\/\/chrenkoff.blogspot.com\/>Arthur Chrenkoff<\/a>, you&#8217;d think they&#8217;re ready to pack their bags and bring us some photoblogging from their vacations in Iraq. Somehow, I don&#8217;t imagine either has the stones. Even though things are, like, <I>awesome<\/I> over there!<\/ul>\n<p>Which set me to thinking up some money-where-mouth-is test of how much Reynolds believes his own BS. Inspired by <a href=http:\/\/www.overpopulation.com\/faq\/People\/julian_simon.html>Julian Simon&#8217;s famous wager with Paul Ehrlich<\/a>, I came up with this: Reynolds would pick a date within the reasonably near future, say a year or two, when he could go to Baghdad for a week. When that date arrived, if he was willing to go as a regular American tourist without U.S. military or other armed protection, then I would buy his round-trip ticket. If he would not go on that date, then he would have to buy me a round-trip ticket to Paris, where I would have to spend a week without U.S. military or other armed protection. I&#8217;d be willing to take my chances. Would Glenn?<\/p>\n<p>Well, I was so excited that I started plotting our little trips online. After finding some pretty good deals on flights to Paris (the point wasn&#8217;t to soak Glenn, after all), I started searching <a href=http:\/\/www.travelocity.com\/>Travelocity<\/a> for flights to Baghdad. What&#8217;s this? No available flights to a <a href=http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Baghdad>city of 5 million-plus<\/a>? But I found flights to Tehran, Beirut, Damascus, and every other Mideast capital I searched for. There must be some mistake! So I looked down the country list, which includes such peaceful, prosperous locales as Zimbabwe, Yemen, Rwanda, and Kyrgyzstan, but no Iraq. Over on <a href=http:\/\/www.expedia.com\/Default.asp?CCheck=1&#038;>Expedia<\/a>, there were no flights to Baghdad, either, but when I searched, the program automatically changed my entry to &#8220;Baghdad, Iraq (SDA-Saddam International)&#8221; \u2013 a handy reminder that regular folks actually used to be able to fly into that airport before the events that led to its <a href=http:\/\/www.globalsecurity.org\/military\/world\/iraq\/saddam-iap.htm>renaming<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>So anyway, looks like the wager is off. Which is probably the best Iraq-related news Glenn will receive anytime soon.  <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Justin Logan writes: [P]rofessor Pundit compares and contrasts how friggin&#8217; awesome things are in Iraq now with how scary and Hobbesian&#8230;er&#8230;France has become. Reynolds wonders: &#8220;Will France improve as much in the coming year as Iraq has in the past year? Doubtful.&#8221; From the telling of Instapundit and guys like Arthur Chrenkoff, you&#8217;d think they&#8217;re [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":15,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"","_seopress_titles_title":"","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[676],"coauthors":[],"class_list":["post-1994","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","tag-antiwar-movement"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"meta_box":{"disable_donate_message":"","custom_donate_message":"","subtitle":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1994","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/15"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1994"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1994\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1994"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1994"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1994"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=1994"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}