Matthew Yglesias (August 18, 2007) - Experts and "Experts" (Foreign Policy)

The last thing the "experts" want is a scorecard of their musings. There seems to be an assumption that being an "expert" is a tenured position regardless of how wrong you are on a regular basis. They are correct to fight the blogs with every dying breath because their livelihood is at stake. The alternative , of course, is to be an actual expert who sees the world clearly, but this may not get them the grants and invitations they so desire.

Posted by Th | August 18, 2007 10:20 AM

"What, for example, is the nature of Michael O'Hanlon's expertise on the broad range of subjects... upon which he comments?" -MY

I think it's less about "expertise" than about "being an expert" -- and "being an expert" means surmounting two hurdles: first, convincing non-conservatives that you know what you're talking about (via academic, personal, and professional credentials), and second, convincing conservatives not to shout you down for contradicting them (which, given the fondness for wishful thinking that prevails among the authoritarian right these days, is easiest to do by, obviously, not contradicting them).

However, conservatives have realized that shouting down non-conservatives is easier than "knowing what you're talking about," and now plenty of non-conservatives (e.g., O'Hanlon/Pollack) have learned the same lesson. Those guys aren't "experts" because they *know* anything; they're "experts" because conservatives don't shout them down and non-conservatives still think people like O'Hanlon/Pollack still respect the non-conservative ideal of actually knowing what the hell you're talking about.

Also, because non-conservatives, wary of doing anything conservatives do, seem to have learned that expressing disagreement is tantamount to shouting down opposition, even when it's justified by facts or logic or both. Which is why O'Hanlon/Pollack can become puppets for the Bush Administration, and their most visible critic is Lefty McBlogosphere (DFH).

Of course, the non-conservative "expert" caucus, much like Senate Democrats after the Lamont-Lieberman primary, remains all too willing to support *their* kind of people, even if those people have, for all practical purposes, become agents of the opposition, because, I imagine, they think, "There but for the grace of god go I..." (and that's the *charitable* interpretation)

Posted by Chris | August 18, 2007 10:32 AM

O'Hanlon is to David Petraeus what Lanny Davis is to Joe Lieberman - a credentialed fluff girl always on hand to make their man look good for the cameras. It's gross.

There are 50 people on Crooked Timber's blogroll with the same credentials as MO'H who have the good sense not to go around calling themselves experts on every damn thing under the sun. They also have the humility to qualify their remarks when they are outside their expertise - all despite having demonstrably better track records than Mr. O'Hanlon. I love PhDs and experts. I just hate stupid wankers who never revisit their original decision making process when things have gone horribly wrong.

Posted by joejoejoe | August 18, 2007 11:07 AM

The foreign policy elite is profoundly undemocratic. They exist solely for the purpose of declaring that foreign policy is out of bounds in terms of a political issue. So yes, if the entire point of your existence is to shout people down who disagree with a rich and monied elite, than you are a profoundly undemocratic person and your organization will reflect that.

Posted by Soullite | August 18, 2007 11:12 AM

Well, I'm a subscriber, and I still have to pay, apparently, for back issues.

Do you remember the Gideon Rose review of Assassin's Gate at TPM Cafe?

It featured this gem:

During the late 1990s, dissatisfaction in Washington with the Clinton administration and its Iraq policies coalesced around a classic "free lunch" solution: "regime change" via the efforts of the Iraqi opposition, personified in the Iraqi National Congress headed by Chalabi. Almost all serious national security professionals knew this was a silly idea, likely to result in a "Bay of Goats" disaster if ever tried, and yet it was touted widely in Congress and among Republicans because it seemed to offer a way around the substantial costs and risks associated with other Iraq policies.
Because they were not totally crazy, neither the Clinton administration nor the Bush administration prior to 9/11 ever really tried to put the idea into practice. And when the Bush team did decide to go to war with Iraq, it ended up doing so not by using a ragtag gang of exiles but the U.S. military itself, helped by Britain. Even an administration supposedly run by neoconservatives hanging on Chalabi's every word, that is, rejected the obviously misguided Chalabi plans for fighting the war and embraced a serious professional approach when it decided that the job actually had to be done. (The debate over Rumsfeld's thinning out of the invasion force, one should recall, was a separate issue, and much less important than his decision to fight the war directly rather than indirectly, as Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, and Douglas Feith, among others, had long argued.)

Please do note the repeated use of "serious," BTW.

I find this amusing, in part because I stopped my Foreign Affairs and Foreign Policy subscriptions after the Wall fell, because they continued to employ the same writers whose writing never entertained the possibility of a Soviet collapse. It seemed to me that to have gotten the most important foreign policy issue so wrong should have had consequences. But the Serious people remained Serious, even though they were Seriously Wrong.

What Rose doesn't seem to grasp (or rather, I think he is pretending not to get) is the criticism is because, quite simply, he and the other Serious People were flat out wrong in every particular.

I mean, here's what Pollack wrote in Rose's magazine in 2002, cited in that TPM post by Rose:

What should the United States do about Iraq? Hawks are wrong to think the problem is desperately urgent or connected to terrorism, but right to see the prospect of a nuclear-armed Saddam Hussein as so worrisome that it requires drastic action. Doves are right about Iraq's not being a good candidate for an Afghan-style war, but wrong to think that inspections and deterrence alone can contain Saddam. The United States has no choice left but to invade Iraq itself and eliminate the current regime.

(BTW, the idea that this guy is cited as a lefty opponent to the war is unbelievable. Doesn't anybody in the media know how to work teh Google?)

Dead, flat, effin' wrong. No caveats. No alternative. War. Drastic action required. This guy is largely responsible for the George Packers and, yes, the Matt Yglesiases buying this misbegotten disaster. And what price?

Op-Ed space in the Times hawking more war. Serious Defenders speaking up for the Foreign Policy Establishment.

I mean, when you are absolutely, utterly and completely wrong about the worst foreign policy debacle since 1812, shouldn't there be consequences? Shouldn't you at least feel bad?

Jeebus.

Posted by jayackroyd | August 18, 2007 11:27 AM

I've been told that you become a media expert on a topic primarily by always being next to your phone. Pretty soon you're on everyone's speed-dial and get called every time there's a mining disaster / school shooting / serial killer or whatever. You obviously have to have some smarts and information, but you don't at all have to be one of the smartest guys in the field.

In foreign affairs you presumably need some credentials and high-level connections, but being accessible to reporters and being able to speak in soundbites is still a big part of it. And it helps your career a lot if you're willing to help push one of the heavily-subsidized political agendas.

Posted by John Emerson | August 18, 2007 11:49 AM

Shouldn't you at least feel bad?

Hey Jayackroyd, why feel bad when the check still clears, the NYT will still publish your drivel and you can still get a table at a really good restaurant?

I hear that the duck with cherry sauce and port reduction is simply delicious. May I recommend a nice pinot noir with that? Perhaps a Gevrey Chambertin '90?

Posted by mjshep | August 18, 2007 12:06 PM

The foreign policy establishment stands convicted of failing to even attempt to stop the worst foreign policy disaster in American history. They failed to try to stop it even on pragmatic grounds. And they failed to defend the American Constitution against the depredations of the "unitary executive" in the process.

This is no small thing.

It's accountability time, gentlemen.

Posted by Junius Brutus | August 18, 2007 12:20 PM

Don't let the revisionists change the subject!

And never forget that this bogus war was a huge mistake; sapping our blood and treasure for nothing.

Posted by Hedley Lamarr | August 18, 2007 12:53 PM

Remember too, that even the most incompetent and ignorant pajama bloggers had access to the Niger FORGERIES before Bush pulled that State of the Union Scam.

First time in my lifetime that I could be a serious foreign affairs expert just by pointing and clicking. You'd think the 'experts' with their international connections would know too. Of course President Cheney knew when he sent his puppy Bush in front of those cameras since he was likely responsible for the forgery in the first place.

Enjoy.

Posted by Tim Fuller | August 18, 2007 1:09 PM

I think that Rose's attack misses the point of the current controversy. The blogospheric attack hasn't been to state that we need to ignore people with real or claimed expertise on anything; it's that we need to stop listening to people who have been dead wrong about the Middle East and the Iraq war. The neocon complaint was an a priori statement that we should ignore the experts who disagreed with the neocons because they ... disagreed with the neocons. The blogosphere's complaint is an a posteriori statement that we should ignore the experts who agreed with the neocons because they were shown to be wrong. I don't see at all the symmetry that Rose asserts.

Posted by PT | August 18, 2007 1:30 PM

.

Why so many words? It's simple.

Get rid of the nepotism and cronyism based group of experts. Replace with a merit based group of experts.

Or simpler: We want BETTER experts, not NO experts.

.

Posted by Brndan | August 18, 2007 1:32 PM

The Serious People are only paying attention to the criticism because they're afraid blogs may have some slight influence. If they could be assured that the criticism they're getting from Matt and others will never make it into the mainstream press, or have any effect on their career prospects, they'd ignore it entirely.

Posted by Donald | August 18, 2007 2:21 PM

I've been told that you become a media expert on a topic primarily by always being next to your phone.

Be next to your phone, live close to a studio (ideally NYC/DC), and best of all, be prepared to come in at five minutes' notice and don't demand a town car. What did Bill Donohue do when he took over the Catholic League? Moved to Manhattan, and put himself on the speed dial of every cabloid producer.

But the wingnut welfare system is good for this, since it provides office space and easy access for its subsidised hacks, aka 'resident scholars'.

(It's funny: I was listening to some American psychiatrist on Radio Australia talking about how people with addictions need to be coerced into personal responsibility, and I instinctively knew that she was wingnut welfare. Sure enough, it was the AEI's Sally Satel, the woman who describes veterans with PTSD as malingering welfare queens.)

Posted by pseudonymous in nc | August 18, 2007 2:25 PM

There really are two issues of concern here. One is the institutional nature of the foreign policy establishment. The other is the content of the foreign policies which that establishment defends and implements.

The foreign policy elite we are talking about here is not just a class of "experts". It is a leadership class whose members move in and out of government, the top ranks of corporate management and boards, the top consultancies and major non-governmental organizations (some of which actually do have clandestine connections with government) and various academic holding pens and think-tanks that serve those other institutions. The ethos of this group is insular, jealously protective of its prerogatives and instinctively anti-democratic. They are collectively imbued with all the independence of private academic and corporate institutions, but with all the power of government.

The problem is not that this establishment consists of unelected and weakly accountable bodies of mere expertise, but has more to do with the way in which establishment expertise is integrated (and not integrated) into our democratic process. Nobody thinks that the academic world, for example, should settle its views on the basis of popular plebiscites and congressional debates. But most academics play a merely consultative role in our politics, offering advice when it is asked for and needed, but leaving the actual running of government and the key decision-making to non-academic politicians. The foreign policy experts who rule the think tanks, the corporate advocacy groups and the top university FP institutes, on the other hand, are the very same people who actually run US foreign policy. They are not members of merely consultative bodies, but an extra-bureaucratic appendage of government. There are very few places in which democratic activity, grass roots organizing, or even congressional legislation play a non-negligible role in the policy making process.

We then come to the question of the actual content of the foreign policy that the foreign policy establishment implements. This has much to do with who these people are and with the limited segments of US society they represent. The people who make up the foreign policy leadership class are the chief stakeholders in an imperial system that began to take shape just over a century ago, but was largely constructed during the Second World War and the Cold War. Their professional and economic interests thus depend on the perpetuation of that system.

What are the components of that system? Entities such as: investment banks pumping US capital into overseas enterprises; the enterprises which receive that capital and constitute what are generally referred to as US "interests" overseas"; the military establishment whose job it is to protect those interests and project the hard power required to expand them; the arms manufacturers who produce the weaponry that equips that military establishment; the intelligence and covert operations services charged with gathering information and exerting imperial control in ways that are too delicate to pass public muster; the public relations and advisory consultancies whose job it is to inform corporations of conditions in the countries of interests, to help bribe influential local leaders, and to help sell the corporate message to foreign publics; the chief foreign beneficiaries of US empire occupying the top social positions in the client and vassal societies; the academic institutions charged with the education and formation of the principals of these institutions; the well-funded corporate advocacy groups who purchase the legislation needed to ease the efficient running of the system; and the non-governmental organizations and cultural enterprises who receive their funding from the top corporations and establishment foundations, and work to ease imperial expansion by restructuring other societies along the preferred US model, and by selling US culture abroad. If one looks at the resumes of the people working in these branches of the FP establishment, one sees that they tend to flow rather freely from one branch to another.

Even though these masters of the universe are actually running US foreign policy, the nature of their funding sources and the details of their organization are often hidden from public view, and are thus largely impervious to democratic intervention. The governmental components are bound up with military and intelligence functions that are inherently secretive and operate large black budgets. The corporate, think-tank and NGO components are shielded from public accountability by their private, non-governmental status.

The veterans of this establishment move in and out of the executive branch. Conveniently, much of the US intellectual elite has been attracted to spurious constitutional doctrines according to which, not just the execution, but the very formation of US foreign policy is a sole executive branch prerogative.

Posted by Dan Kervick | August 18, 2007 2:36 PM

Along with learning at least one other language than English, the foreign policy clerisy should learn the elementary logic of argument. Apparently, the man who has been teaching logic to them so far is David Broder. Thus, Rose thinks it is a knock me down proof of the wrongness of the criticisms of the clerisy leveled by Greenwald, et al., that ... criticisms have also been leveled by ... the neo-cons! Both sides have criticized the foreign policy establishment! And as we know, the world is flat. Thus, the clerisy is in the middle, and so must be balanced. Balanced balanced balanced. Balanced is good, the good is true, and we truly deserve a chair at the AEI-Brookings-Carnegie Institute on Peacekeeping and Keeping a Piece.

Rose really does think this is a good argument. He thinks this is something those bloggers never thought of! All of which shows that in D.C., it is probably accepted as a good argument. Actually, though, a good argument doesn't begin by pointing out that it is being argued with, and thus must be right. It begins by making a case for being right. I know, so bothersome. Includes things like facts. Some notion of probability. Maybe even a smidgen, o so tiny, of knowledge about country x that we are about to invade. I am of course not suggesting that Rose get soft and start thinking that mass murder committed by American soldiers is a crime or anything. Heavens, that would be like trusting Beauchamp, that well known Osama bin Laden co-conspirator. Just things like noticing that an invasion probably leads to an occupation. Controversial, true. The left, or at least one lefty in Belleview, will attack you and say no it doesn't. The right will attack you and say it leads to a liberation. But as this easily shows, using the Broder theorem, it has to be true! Starting from there, perhaps Rose can discover some other amazing things about foreign policy.

Posted by roger | August 18, 2007 2:41 PM

Rose missed the point. The point is that people who work in think tanks, especially the big centrist ones, are politicized. They are part of the politics they observe and discuss. They are are part analyst, part politician. That is not necessarily wrong, but it is silly to treat their integrity as sacrosanct and not wonder about their motives. Universities are a good place to look for more honest commentary -- although too few professors offer it -- because the incentive structure there is different. It is screwed up in other ways, but it rewards honesty and contrarianism.

Posted by Ben | August 18, 2007 3:23 PM

Universities are a good place to look for more honest commentary -- although too few professors offer it -- because the incentive structure there is different. It is screwed up in other ways, but it rewards honesty and contrarianism.

Perhaps not quite so much in the foreign policy field, Ben.

I took an International Relations course when I was in college, in 1979 or 1980 I think. My college had a well-known graduate school of international law and diplomacy, and I believe my professor also taught in that graduate program. The professor was completely unlike any of the other professors I had in my four years.

For one thing, he wore a suit: not a tweedy soft-toned academic suit, but a dark conservative suit with tie of the kind you would typically see in the corporate world or government - black wing tips and all. His hair was conservatively and very neatly cut, parted and lacquered into place. It was all quite out of the ordinary for the academic world of 1980. Despite the relatively conservative stylings, I'm fairly sure he was a Democrat.

These are just matters of visual style, but much more striking was his manner of speaking and lecturing. Everything he said had that highly circumspect and evasive character one associates with State Department spokesmen, and was delivered in a sententious baritone as if from a televised distance. There was nothing in the least bit contrarian about it, or even blunt. But it all had a very grave, serious tone to it. There was nothing like the exciting exchange of ideas or intriguingly provocative novelties or cutting edge research I associated with my other classes. There was something very unreal about him. It seemed to me that he was just waiting for a call from government.

It was also a frustrating course. I was a good student, but I felt as though the purpose of this course was to teach me to speak and compose essays in a strange foreign language, whose grammar I had difficulty grasping. It also seemed that if I didn't believe the right things politically, there was no way I could give the right answer, since the form and content of the language were so closely intertwined that only those who shared the appropriate political presuppositions could even speak the language correctly.

My impression these day is in the highest-level IR academic world, the faculties are not really evaluated by their research, but by how "illustrious" they are. And their illustriousness is measured not by publications and the strictly academic reception of their research, and certainly not by the novelty of their thinking, but by how many of them have been in government, and at which levels. The more closely your faculty flies to the flames of power, the more important and highly regarded they are. It is much more important to have a former National Security Council member, or Undersecretary of something or other, than to have some interesting outside academic, whose theories might have revolutionized a field.

My sense is that a fundamental function of the government and IR faculties at elite institutions of higher learning is to initiate its students into the councils of power, to provide them with social entrees and positions working under the right people, and to make sure that academic criteria of penetrating thinking are not given too high a priority, as opposed to a kind of safe and ineffable "rightness" or "soundness".

Posted by Dan Kervick | August 18, 2007 4:56 PM

I worked at the Brookings Institution during the run-up to the war, and Martin Indyk held a lunch in which he outlined the case for war (beginning with the history of Saddam Hussein).

I remember asking him a question afterwards along the lines of, "You make Hussein sound like a rational actor, so why aren't you advocating that we treat him like one, i.e. continue with deterrence?" He said something about historical overreach, such as Kuwait.

I got the impression that these guys already had an answer to give, even though their ideologies ran contrary to the answer. Old guys are usually realists, not idealists, and the realist in him had to be screaming "Deterrence!" I was a young guy, however, so I wasn't as upset as I ought to have been. A lot of us supported what we thought was ultimately a liberal war, support that should disqualify us from "expert status" for at least a period in the wilderness to come to our realist senses.

Pollack and O'Hanlon need to go into the wilderness.

Posted by Matt | August 18, 2007 5:32 PM

roger--

While you're correct in assessing the weakness of the argument, I think it's really simple. Rose is asserting his right to determine who is in the in-group. Those crazy neocons and those wacky bloggers are outside.

You're a foreign policy expert if Rose says you are.

But the real perniciousness is in what Dan Kervick is saying. One thing that he doesn't make clear in his otherwise very lucid comment about the way this whole foreign policy apparatus is organized is that these decions, the establishment position, is made in secret.

For example, the plan for Iraq, from the beginning and still today, is permanent occupation by the US, with a pliant leader in place who will tolerate not having control of Iraq's national security. This will necessarily not be a representative government, because no representative government would be willing to join the US in supporting Israell and putting Iran on the terrorist list. Everybody knows this, but nobody talks about it.

All these establishment figures--think tankers, Senators, State department folks--all know that the plan is permanent occupation. There really is nothing else to be done at this point--there is no national defense capability in Iraq.

But nobody will say that out loud, because that would be a terribly unpopular position. Nobody wants a permanent occupation out here in constituent land, but that is a given among the foreign policymakers in Washington.

The magnitude of the failure here is very difficult to overstate, and these guys are going to keep compounding the failure. No plans can be put into place for a withdrawal that doesn't feature some way to defend Iraq's borders. And they can't do that themselves.

If you listen, you will hear in the public discussion assumptions of a permanent Iraq client state with its borders defended by US air, armor and commmand and control. It is routine for the sovreignty of Iraq to be treated as non-existent. When you hear discussions of why Malki may need to be replaced, that's what you're hearing. When the US Congress passes legislation that directs the Iraq legislature what laws to pass, and what actions to take, that's another statement attesting to the fact that there is no sovereign government in Iraq, and nobody expects one to emerge.

This is a very profound lie that is being told to the American people. And the whole passel of them are cooperating in perpetuating the lie that US is promoting democracy in the Middle East by taking alternating sides in a civil war.

The only people who do have to answer some of these questions are the democratic presidential candidates, and Republican senators up for reelection. Everyone else can avoid them. And you should have noticed by now that those people who do have to answer these questions do not answer them clearly or coherently. To my mind, Clinton is the worst. She makes declarative statements about getting out in the first part of her answers, and then gets out the hat and cane.

But in the end, I don't believe any of them--because they are not talking realistically about the situation.

Posted by jayackroyd | August 18, 2007 6:03 PM