Time For The Irony Sign

When my brother and I were teenagers, my dad used to have a joke about how we should be made to hold up "irony" signs when we said something around the dinner table that we didn't intend to take seriously. Maybe I should start using one for Noah Pollack's benefit. He's apparently an admirer of the work of Martin Kramer, who holds the view that the mainstream of the field of Middle East Studies does bad work. Or, as Pollack puts it, that "they've become enamored of post-colonial academic fads." Because Kramer thinks their work is bad, he takes the view that the views of mainstream scholars in the field should be marginalized in our discourse and our policy process.

I disagree, and glossed this ironically as the view that "the problem with U.S. Middle East policy is that it's unduly influenced by people who are knowledgeable about the Middle East."Pollack then decides to prove that if you take that literally, it's not literally true.

At any rate, if you were sitting around in December 2001 looking at the dispute between the Middle East Studies mainstream and the Kramer-style revisionist camp, you might have a hard time making up your mind. The mainstream is the mainstream, and there's a lot to be said for following the academic consensus. The consensus, however, could be wrong. Maybe academic fashion really has just gone astray. Fortunately, though, we've actually had the experiencing of living now for the past five or six years in a country that's made drastic policy decisions in the Middle East that have been heavily influenced by interpretations favored by people and institutions -- Bernard Lewis, Daniel Pipes, Martin Kramer, the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, etc. -- firmly in the revisionist camp. It's all turned out to be a huge disaster.

By contrast, while mainstream Middle East Studies folks (Juan Cole and Marc Lynch probably the ones best-known to the blogosphere) haven't been right about everything, their commentary over these years has held up quite well. It looks like maybe the mainstream views are mainstream because they're correct! It's also telling that in many respects what Middle East Studies scholars have been telling us about the Bush administration's policies is broadly similar to what international relations scholars have been telling us. But as I say, at this point the proof is in the pudding, and the revisionist pudding is terrible.

Comments

So what's the difference between a Mainstream Middle-Eastern or International Relations expert, and a Very Serious Foreign Policy person?

Posted by Ben | August 17, 2007 5:40 PM

It may mark the first time that Yglesias will actually have to read something serious about the Middle East. (from Pollack's Corner post).

I see only four possible interpretations of this closing statement, all delightful:
(1) Yglesias has a stalker, who knows and has assessed all of his reading on the Middle East - and found it wanting!
(2) Yglesias has recently admitted never reading anything serious about the Middle East. How embarassing.
(3) The very act of reading something Pollack considers "serious" about the Middle East is a profound and transformative experience that, without fail, causes the reader to agree with him on all counts. The eerie power of there writings has necessitated their rarity.
(4) Pollack is full of crap.

Me, I'm rooting for possibility (4), though (3) strikes me as malignly nifty.

Posted by Warren Terra | August 17, 2007 5:42 PM

"I don't recall a criticism of my views as crude as this one."

Priceless!

Who knew Matt is a uncivilized fool probably educated at some diploma mill run by hucksters.

Posted by gregor | August 17, 2007 5:53 PM

This is of course brilliant analysis, except that the “revisionist” school (actually, it's the Middle East mainstream that does most of the revisionism when it comes to the region’s history and politics) that you prefer to see as eager interventionists were nothing of the kind.

Kramer opposed both the invasion of Iraq and the democratization/nation-building project, while Pipes backed military action but not the effort to build the Iraqi Great Society from the ground up. The Washington Institute for Near East Policy seems intellectually diverse and I doubt very much there was any consensus about the wisdom of the Iraq war.

All of this would probably be obvious to you if you had taken the time to, you know, actually read things that Pipes and Kramer had written, but why do the hard work when sneering is so satisfying. For such a smart guy -- no sarcasm intended -- you’re regrettably enamored of the cheap shot.

Posted by LT | August 17, 2007 6:25 PM

Matt's argument is that if you were wrong about invading Iraq then you are right about everything else forever even if it has no relation to Iraq. You may have been wrong about everything else in your entire life, but if you were right about Iraq then you are a middle eastern studies genius.

The fact that he is so enamored with Juan Cole is hilarious. Juan Cole is a specialist in 18th century Iran. He does not publish serious academic work on the modern Middle East. His latest book is on Napoleon’s Invasion of Egypt the 18th century. He doesn't even speak Arabic fluently.

He can't represent the academic consensus on the modern middle east because he isn't an academic in that field

Tony Baradan has embarrassed Juan Cole more times than I can remember.

http://beirut2bayside.blogspot.com/search?q=Juan+Cole

Middle Eastern Studies in the US is basically Demonize Israel studies. That is why Nadia Al-haj is up for tenure at Barnard based on her book denying the existence of ancient Israel and arguing that it is all a fabrication of Israeli archaeologists.

Posted by Dave | August 17, 2007 6:28 PM

Back in the 1980s when Reagan and the liberal hawks were gleefully hiring thugs and mass murderers to kill civilians in Central America, it wasn't easy to find groups of academics to endorse the barbarism.

That was one time in which the right really began pumping out the fake think tanks for foreign policy, because it was difficult to get the Latin American Studies Association or what not to say, "Yay!! Kill Nicaraguans!! Kill Guatemalans!! Yay!!"

As Greg Gandin put it:

Many political commentators today recognize that a familiar cast of characters has reappeared to lead the Bush administration’s “war on terror.” As Grandin quipped, more than several “Iran-Contra notables” currently hold posts under Bush, including Elliot Abrams, John Bolton, Otto Reich, John Negroponte and John Poindexter.

Yet for Grandin this is not simply a story of rehashed personnel. He points to U.S. foreign policy in Latin American during the 1980s as the critical government project that changed U.S. politics domestically and paved the way for the rise of the New Right. A powerful coalition of neoconservatives, staunch militarists and evangelical Christians first found political common ground in Latin American diplomacy more than 20 years ago. The political undertakings of this new coalition, which played out in Nicaragua, Guatemala and El Salvador to detrimental effect, “can best be understood as a dress rehearsal for what is going on now in the Middle East.”

In the wake of a demoralizing defeat in Vietnam , the late 1970s marked a period of economic recession and political crisis in the United States. Reagan’s Cold War administration faced an American public and Democratic Congress skeptical of imperial politics. A militarized response to communism in Europe and the Soviet Union would prove to be an impossible exploit.

Public opposition to interventionist diplomacy forced Reagan administrators to broaden their support base and war strategy. Neoconservative intellectuals like Jeane Kirkpatrick, ambassador to the United Nations under Reagan, helped strengthen ties between the White House and militarized government bureaucrats, like Vietnam veteran and Iran-Contra fall guy, Oliver North.

Reagan administrators also built ties with socially conservative interests groups, such as evangelical Christians. Latin America, it seems, was one place where secular neoconservative hawks and social conservatives could reach a clear political consensus.

For one, the growth of liberation theology in Central America during the 1980s was an affront to the “free market moralism” of conservative Christian capitalists. Activists from the Christian right, like Jerry Farwell and Pat Robertson, were enlisted to fight a theological war against the Christian left, which critiqued global capitalism and third world poverty. Evangelical preachers championed the dogma of American exceptionalism and international duty from the pulpit, and conservative Christian business leaders privately funded opposition parties in Nicaragua, where Catholic liberation theologians were active in the Sandinista government.

The audience was extremely interested in Grandin's argument relating current post-9/11 foreign policy to the Reagan Administration's Latin America policy in the 1980s.

A coalition of neoconservatives, militarists and the Christian right also begot a new way of talking about foreign policy from the White House. Following Vietnam, the New Right needed to “re-establish American diplomacy on an ethical foundation” and reinvigorate a despondent American public. The once powerful platform of anticommunism had lost its rhetorical punch, and the language used to justify intervention abroad had to shift in order to neutralize military skepticism in American political culture.

Global democracy and human rights, formerly the rhetorical terrain of the Democratic Party, were appropriated for the Republican Party platform and used to justify military action in Latin America . “Revolution in the name of democracy became a marketing device,” Grandin stated, which legitimated foreign policy, or at the very least offset public distaste for undiplomatic diplomacy.

http://socrates.berkeley.edu:7001/Events/fall2006/09-25-06-grandin/index.html

Posted by El Cid | August 17, 2007 6:59 PM

Well, Matt You are clearly not a VERY SERIOUS PERSON. On top of being unserious you are also crude. Shame on you. Why can't just close your eyes and listen to your betters and their plan to carry on a endless series of wars until teh rapture frees us all...Well the VSP anyway.

Posted by Chance | August 17, 2007 7:09 PM

Wow, this is just like the Goldberg-Cole dust up from a few years ago, except that, unlike Goldberg, Yglesias has read books, and, unlike Kramer, Cole's work is highly regarded.

Posted by M. Duss | August 17, 2007 7:26 PM

There were plenty of experts on the Middle East who aren't either neocon nutjobs or hate-Israel academics: oil men, military men, State Department experts, etc. James Fallows interviewed them for your magazine just before the war and most of them thought the invasion was pretty dumb.

Posted by Steve Sailer | August 17, 2007 7:35 PM

"most of them thought the invasion was pretty dumb."

So did Matt's boogeyman of the day, Martin Kramer. Except Matt couldn't spare 5 minutes to actually check out that fact.

Posted by Dave | August 17, 2007 8:28 PM

The proof is in the pudding...

Okay, waaaayy off topic here, but the goddamn proof is not "in the pudding". That doesn't even make sense. The expression is "The proof of the pudding is in the eating"... in other words, you have to try something to know if it's good. Why, God, why must people continually mangle this expression?

*** Takes deep breath, puts down keyboard, backs away slowly ***

Posted by Sean Peters | August 17, 2007 10:15 PM

Martin Kramer, 10 December 2001 in National Review:

To achieve the first, spiking the guns of the rogues, the United States has no alternative but to turn up the heat on Saddam Hussein. If 9/11 is to mean anything in the Middle East, it has to mean something for the future of Saddam. No one knows for sure whether Saddam had anything to do with 9/11, but it doesn't matter. If he is not dealt with now, the day might come when the entire Middle East will have to place an emergency call to Washington. Saddam may be the only leader in the region with the will, the way, and the lack of restraint needed to plunge the region into a cataclysm. The United States has an advantage now, and it should not fail to press it. The Arabs and the Europeans will whine and warn through the build-up to D-Day. But if the United States is resolute, they will fall into line. They usually do.

How against?

Posted by MMGood | August 17, 2007 11:14 PM

"Pipes backed military action but not the effort to build the Iraqi Great Society from the ground up."

In other words, just destroy them and move on to Iran.

Yeah, that's real intellectual of him.

I've seen enough quotes from Pipes to know what he's on about. He's a "kill them all, let Allah sort them out" neocon jackass who hates Arabs and loves Zionists.

Anybody who says different is an idiot.

I don't know what "academic credentials" Juan Cole has for being a Middle East expert in terms of ancient or modern. He certainly knows enough to MAKE SENSE when he speaks, unlike the rest of the morons who sound like Israeli Zionists or neocons, as the Kramer quote above clearly indicates.

We need to stop paying "respect" to MORONS who are ruining the entire world, let alone the country.

Posted by Richard Steven Hack | August 17, 2007 11:46 PM

Irony is sometimes difficult to pick up in short little essays. Even quite blatant sarcasm is often missed. For either to be picked up the reader usually has to have some context as to the style and general outlook of the writer.

When speaking it's far easier to pick up irony or sarcasm because the context is in the conversation and there are clues in inflection along with many non verbal signals.

One should expect that a certain portion of readers will not get the irony of a post. It just comes with the territory. There is also a certain portion of readers who will miss the irony on purpose to make their points. In those cases it's always a negative point about the author.

Posted by rapier | August 18, 2007 7:33 AM

The "Kramer-style revisionist camp" are apparently now revising their thoughts on the wisdom of invading Iraq.

Posted by mulligan | August 18, 2007 7:54 AM

What LT said. Sums up MY (at least on the Middle East) perfectly!

Posted by Hal | August 18, 2007 10:23 AM

A few years ago, Slate had an essay arguing for the addition of a "sarcasm point" to English punctuation, which sounds similar to your irony sign.

Posted by Dimmy Karras | August 18, 2007 11:34 AM

In 2001, Kramer was just talking about putting pressure on Saddam at that point not invading. Do you really think "turn the heat up" is a euphemism for invasion?

Here is Kramer in 2003 talking about whether he thinks it s a good idea to set up Democracy in the Arab world

"I believe the underpinnings of such a transformation are completely lacking in the Arab world. Any attempt to promote democracy, far from making things better, might make them worse."

So you can see Kramer was a skeptic over the whole democracy project.

But, lets look at what Juan Cole said. Seems he was FOR the war before he was against it.

"The Iraq war has resulted in many human casualties that make any humane person want to weep. I hope the human sacrifice will have been worth it; certainly Saddam's regime was virtually genocidal and it is a great good thing that it is gone."

http://64.233.167.104/custom?q=cache:SZhNf2UhRY4J:www.juancole.com/2003_04_01_juancole_archive.html+virtually+genocidal&hl=en&ie=UTF-8

"I am an Arabist and happen to know something serious about Baathist Iraq, which paralyzes me from opposing a war for regime change in that country.

http://64.233.167.104/custom?q=cache:6NEExoP7cOQJ:www.juancole.com/2003_02_01_juancole_archive.html+Milosevic&hl=en&ie=UTF-8

"I remain convinced that, for all the concerns one might have about the aftermath, the removal of Saddam Hussein and the murderous Baath regime from power will be worth the sacrifices that are about to be made on all sides.

http://64.233.167.104/custom?q=cache:nf-iCIM0sZYJ:www.juancole.com/2003_03_01_juancole_archive.html+I+remain+convinced&hl=en&ie=UTF-8

So, I refused to come out against the war. I was against the way the war was pursued--the innuendo, the exaggerations, the arrogant unilateralism. But I could not bring myself to be against the removal of that genocidal regime from power."

http://64.233.167.104/custom?q=cache:GCd1a7uHm2YJ:www.juancole.com/2003_07_01_juancole_archive.html+Milosevic&hl=en&ie=UTF-8

Posted by Dave | August 18, 2007 11:55 AM

Martin Kramer's point is more than just that the mainstream of US Middle East Studies does bad work. The problem is that Middle East Studies has failed to produce any work, good or bad, relevant to US foreign policy.

In the lengthening indictment of Middle Eastern studies, Cole's confession—"no American historian has essayed a major work on Baathist Iraq"—is one of the weightiest counts. That absence, like the absence of studies of Bin Laden, is the result of a skewed academic culture that systematically discourages policy-relevant research. Why Washington continues to pump money into this enterprise is more of a mystery than the doings of Saddam Hussein.

Not a single study of Baathist Iraq! Not one! These are your academic "experts."

Posted by Ragout | August 18, 2007 2:15 PM