It should be interesting to see what they will do with this plan then. Drop it immediately? They'd have to, to stay consistent.

Yes.

And their inevitable failure to do so will show how important internal consistency is to them — or to any discussion of their policies and motives.

It's the fact that he failed to disclose these interests which is particularly damning—casting a pall of suspicion on his motivations for every policy he advocated for Iraq. Had I known, it certainly would have colored my interpretation of the views he expressed in his book, “The End of Iraq.”

Well it's not just his credibility as an author that's on the line. The guy was part of the drafting of the country's constitution. Imagine if the Marguis de Lafayette had successfully thrown his weight behind a constitutional prohibition against the maintenance of any militia in the new United States, only to later reveal that he was secretly in the pay of the British government and certain Canadian landed interests eager to seize parts of New England.

Part of why this matters so much is that we have a lot invested in the idea that the people who go around saying, "All of these think tank types are nothing more than the willing pawns of the power elite," are just being paranoid. Surely, we want to explain, all of these smart people could not have arrived at the same reasoned, thoughtful conclusions through some kind of enormous self-perpetuating system of lucrative incentives to embrace doctrinal purity, and concomitant curb-kicking to anyone who does not.

But when we discover that one of these people really is not so much the "brightest and best" as simply the "brightest and best paid," it kind of takes the wind out of those sails, doesn't it?

Even if every other Iraq policy expert is totally, sincerely devoted to pure unadulterated public scholarship without a single dollar of personal profit influencing the recommendations they make — which is simply impossible to believe — the best case scenario (from their point of view anyway) is that they have all lost their credibility anyway and now have to earn it back.

Still, I think it's wrong to suggest that these financial interests were the only factors that influenced his thinking.

It's reasonable to assume that Peter Galbraith sincerely believes everything he's said or written. Heck, it's reasonable to assume the same of Thomas Friedman, too. It's easy to imagine an entire system of sincere people acting in good faith leading more or less directly to the kind of corrupted discourse and brain-dead ideas we suffer from today, provided only that we as a people tolerate discursive monoculture, imbalanced spending priorities, and the influence of private sector funding in public policy research.

The problem is not in figuring out whether Peter Galbraith really believes in Kurdish autonomy or not. The problem is that as someone with a massive personal financial stake in the outcome of that debate, he is incapable of viewing the issues critically or impartially.

There is nothing intrinsically evil about being a well-paid spokesman for Kurdish autonomy. But being so ought to naturally disqualify one from consideration as a disinterested intellectual. There are supposed to be rules for how those sorts of disclosures work, and Galbraith broke them.

Glenn Greenwald maintains that it won't matter, since corruption of public discourse is already so extensive as to have become banal. Bu whether or not that's true, it's still going to be a huge problem in Iraq. (And not just among Iraqis — a lot of Americans working there really do believe that the "brightest and best" are on the job, and that we can all trust their expertise and judgment. Every time something like this happens, more of them lose heart and stop believing in what they're doing. Which may be good or bad, depending on how you view things.)

Private Mail carriers being able to compete with the Government? That sounds pretty crazy!

Actually it does.

Let me help you out with something. When people say that Libertarians don't know anything about economics, what they mean is that screeds like this demonstrate a development of economic understanding that stopped in elementary school, before the lessons about things like natural monopoly, universal service, and hydraulic despotism.

It's consistent, it's typical, and it's an embarrassment.