"We Must Be Doing Something Right!"

Commenter Roger picks up on something I'd noticed but not commented on: "Thus, [Gideon] 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!" Indeed. This argument pops up in a surprising variety of places, and it truly seems like the last resort of the damned.

In the real world, after all, anyone who gets criticized at all ends up getting criticized "by both sides." Just because you're a liberal blogger like me doesn't mean there aren't other bloggers out there who are further to the left and willing to criticize me. And yet, not everyone who's not as far right as one might be but also not as far left as one might be can simultaneously all be correct.

Meanwhile, this line of thought prejudices analysis of future issues. If the criteria of sober-minded sensibility is that both sides' partisans think you're wrong, then you've preemptively excluded from consideration the possibility that one side might ever be correct. So no matter how true it may be that the current conflict with Iran has been cooked up by some mix of Bush administration blundering and Bush administration malignancy, one can't simply say that because then liberals won't complain. So you need to exhort liberals to take the threat more "seriously," get yelled at, and then go home feelings very sensible.

Comments

yes, i noticed that as well, although i thought about it as the equivalent of those in the media who say "we're being criticized by the left and the right, so we must be doing something right."

it's a very serious argument, of course....

Posted by howard | August 19, 2007 10:24 AM

I think the shorter version of that response is, "Just because we responded to pressure from neocons doesn't mean (A) we liked it, (B) we thought they were right, or (C) we want to get a dose from you -- so why are you yelling at us?"

To which the answers are:
(A) that doesn't matter much;
(B) since you've let yourselves be swayed, you'll excuse us if we had trouble telling the difference; and
(C) what else are we supposed to do, since you and they have shown us that it's what you react to most effectively -- and if you'll change direction for them when they're wrong, why won't you change direction for us when we're right?

If the answer to that last question boils down to, "Because we're afraid they'll call us Dirty Fucking Hippies," then I don't think that'll be sufficient to stave off our irritation, and I don't think it should. Really, "they called us names and got us to do what they wanted" is not the kind of explanation that should inspire us to let them off the hook, even as they threaten to do the same thing again.

(though I get that with two camps to deal with, one crazy and one not, the idea of appeasing the crazy camp and finding an explanation to sell the non-crazy camp does have more self-serving/-preservation appeal than the reverse... I just don't think we're under any obligation to accept it as good policy or pretend it's not enabling.)

Posted by Chris | August 19, 2007 10:28 AM

The issue isn't whether the FPC is exempt from criticism; of course they aren't. But you, Atrios and Co. have been doing of late is something different; you've been challenging their legitimacy. Instead of criticizing their views--sure, why not?--you've been attacking them as people, telling us that they're careerists and cowards who trim their views to political pressures, and thus shouldn't be listened to. In that regard you really *are* like the neocons--or, for that matter, those who attack climatologists for enforcing that alleged global-warming "hoax" and freezing out [so to speak] dissenters from the True Faith. I've been handing around the blogosphere long enough to know that you people regard these sorts of ad hominem attacks as perfectly legitimate modes of argument. That's not how I was raised.

Posted by David | August 19, 2007 11:07 AM

Rose doesn't note that the criticisms and the prescriptions involved are very different. Moreover, Rose isn't defending a policy; he's simply saying that the establishment has been criticized at various points, and therefore any policy recommendation by said establishment is good, even if that policy recommendation is exactly the same as the neo-cons Rose is implicitly deriding. He's awarding himself the position of final arbiter, which is exactly the position that's being criticized. As in, why does the foreign policy establishment get to be the final arbiter when they have no policies of their own, so they often simply carry water for other people, and why are they so often far more wrong than right, not to mention, nobody fucking elected them to any office.

Why, you'd almost think they were less interested completely uninterested in policy versus being almost totally invested in preserving their position as supposed arbiter.

If the criteria of sober-minded sensibility is that both sides' partisans think you're wrong, then you've preemptively excluded from consideration the possibility that one side might ever be correct.

I didn't see Rose as establishing that as the criteria; the criteria for sober-minded sensibility is that you are part of the foreign policy establishment. Being criticized by both sides merely confirms your membership. Issues of actual policy are completely disconnected from issues of membership. The entire article mostly just skipped over policy and just asserted priviledge.

m, they don't, he noted, have a bar association

Posted by max | August 19, 2007 12:47 PM

David, you write:

"The issue isn't whether the FPC is exempt from criticism; of course they aren't. But you, Atrios and Co. have been doing of late is something different; you've been challenging their legitimacy. Instead of criticizing their views--sure, why not?--you've been attacking them as people, telling us that they're careerists and cowards who trim their views to political pressures..."

This ignores the notion of 'seriousness' - a code word which, before it was picked up and mocked by Atrios, was used quite 'seriously' within the foreign policy clerisy to categorize viewpoints. So the question is: what makes for seriousness? If you are a serious engineer, carpenter, or farmer, surely it is a practical question. Did your theories turn out correctly?

But that doesn't seem to constitute seriousness among what Rose calls, obtusely, the clerisy. In fact, his defense of the clerisy is not that the majority of the FPC community was right about Iraq, but merely that that they balanced out their pro-invasion pieces with one anti-invasion piece. In other words, if you throw out enough theories, you are doing your job. One of them might stick!

I can't imagine an economics journal editor making the same defense.

This indicates serious and unaddressed methodological problems with foreign policy 'science'. A fair question to ask is: is there any connection between the methodology of foreign policy expertise and being a 'serious' foreign policy analyst?

It is obvious to me that the major and overwhelming problem with the foreign policy clerisy leading into the invasion was a systematic blindness to the connection between invasion and occupation. By disconnecting the two, the clerisy was following in the talking points of the administration - an administration unwilling to talk honestly about resourcing what they were proposing in Iraq. And this bias towards a short term definition of Iraq policy still exists with these people, even in retrospect. The Michael O'Hanlon interview with Greenwald is illuminating in this regard. He retroactively identifies himself with Shinseki's remark about Iraq, but he entirely distorts the remark: Shinseki argued that more troops were needed for the post-invasion occupation, and O'Hanlon turns that around to mean more troops were needed for the invasion. That almost unconscious change of focus on O'Hanlon's part gets to the heart of why the pro-invasion people were wrong: they thought of the invasion as a one off, a one night stand. They, like the Bush administration, thought entirely in the short range. It was as if they were advocating Panama, 1990 all over again.

I believe that they could look at the map and could compare population sizes like any 12 year old. Since this severe and systematic disconnect favored the administration's policy, and since the clerisy never actually questioned why they accepted the administration's assumptions (why, even, they accept the American definition of WMD, which seems to shift a lot - now that the U.S. is committed to helping India's nuclear weapons program, it has shifted into the lunatic category) , one has to speculate that there are other forces involved here besides scholarship. As I recall, at the New Republic, they fired the editor who accepted the Stephen Glass pieces. Yet who has been dismissed from any foreign policy journal? By pretending that it is unfair to make this a question about careers, you preserve the careers of those who were wrong, and who are still unable to understand why they were wrong. Bad idea.

Posted by roger | August 19, 2007 1:07 PM

This argument pops up in a surprising variety of places, and it truly seems like the last resort of the damned.

It has occurred to me that if Saddam Hussein had said "both Osama bin Laden and the Bush Administration hate me, so I must be doing something right," he might have survived. Well, not really, but that just shows how selective and weak the argument is.

Posted by latts | August 19, 2007 1:38 PM

david, apparently you weren't "raised" to actually formulate fact-based arguments and utilize analogies that are analogous.

Posted by howard | August 19, 2007 4:30 PM

Didn't there at one point used to be somewhat smarter conservative commenters that would pop up so often or am I just imagining it? It seems like the conservatives on this site have just been getting stupider.

Posted by Reality Man | August 19, 2007 6:31 PM

There's David and then there's david. I also was raised to argue badly, but there's still a difference.

Posted by david | August 19, 2007 8:17 PM

david, sorry! since i do most everything lower cap....

reality man: yes, back at the dawn of time, people like john cole and sebastian holdsclaw and others whose names are escaping me used to comment at matthew's earliest site, real, honest conservatives (although john cole in particular has come a very long way).

now, not so much....

Posted by howard | August 19, 2007 11:06 PM

Another point that Greenwald makes, which Rosen does not address, is that -- while the FPC perhaps is being attacked by the right and the left (the validity of this arguement has been well addressed elsewhere) -- the neo-cons are upstanding members of the Serious foreign policy community in spite of all the horrible mistakes they have advocated whereas the left has been branded as unserious (because the left doesn't believe in using military force to maintain US dominance in the world) and doesn't have a seat at a the table.

Posted by steve | August 20, 2007 4:05 PM