THE ONE AND ONLY PRINCIPLE OF OUTSIDE EXPERTISE: Consultants' and other outside experts' stock in trade is a smoke screen of theory offered to justify whatever the client wants to do.

I'm getting tired of all this hand-wringing. Everybody, progressive bloggers included, knows that the name of the game is flexibility, not credibility. Stop whining!

The Very Serious People who talked up the Iraq war in 2002 and 2003, and who now deny that they ever did so, are being 100% consistent with the Expertise Principle. The winds have shifted, and their analyses have shifted with it. If anything, their willingness to deny what they said in the past makes them more marketable, because they are demonstrating their shamelessness -- that they're willing to say just about anything to pitch the client's line, irrespective of what they learned in school or what they said yesterday. Shamelessness is a physical trait every bit as pertinent in their line of work as height is in the NBA. So they show it off.

Most of these orthodoxies are ossified 50-year-old relics from the Cold War..

Condi Rice was a Russian specialist.

I found a recipe, but I think we can do better than this...

http://www.blogadilla.com/2007/07/23/diy-jail-cake/#comments

and a few more links besides, such as this bit about Mario Savio (Time, July 7, 1967):

The note passed from hand to hand among the spectators in Berkeley municipal court advised everyone to "rise silently when Mario comes in." A lot of them did—though silence was a curious tribute to pay Mario Savio, 23, noisiest voice of the Free Speech Movement that raised such a commotion for two years at the University of California. Savio earned himself a 120-day jail sentence from the Berkeley court for trespassing, resisting arrest and refusal to disperse, fought the rap unsuccessfully for two years through higher courts (the U.S. Supreme Court refused to review it), and last week marched off to the pokey after taking a bite of his farewell gift from friends: a chocolate cake with a hacksaw stuck in the middle.

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,899566,00.html?promoid=googlep

It kind of makes a person wonder if there's going to be an increase in the market for cakes baked with hacksaws inside them... you know, under the circumstances.

Anonymous, that's an interesting thesis; I dare say it's even true. The problem for the lay person is that this robust exchange of ideas seems not to have kept us from two disastrous wars which had exactly the opposite effect on our well-being that we were told by the scholars and experts to expect. I won't even bother to enumerate the myriad of little wars in between the two big ones which did no one any good either.

So...how much worse would it have been -- could it have been -- if folks like we here had been in charge? I have no Vietnamese, no Arabic; I was never a general or a fellow at the Brookings Institution, or a columnist for the New York Times or Washington Post, yet nothing I would have done could have brought us to this pass.

There's something to be said for democracy after all, don't you think? I mean this in its simplest form: let the auto mechanics and farmers, the roofing contractors and insurance salesmen, the waitresses and students and people who're going to have to put on uniforms and fight these miserable wars join the conversation. Their lack of interest has been assiduously cultivated by the experts, and look where that has gotten us. Suppose we were to cultivate the opposite in them. Do you really think they could have done any worse?

I don't think war with Pakistan is at all inevitable, but if you want to explore that, I'll argue it with pleasure. And, we will be furthering the goals of GG's post by talking foreign policy while being public. (similar to driving while black, or flying while Muslim)

Re: Power, she has had a remarkable career already, and not even 35 yet. Very impressive and admirable. Sysprog says she's not a wonk. Fine by me. His posted article calls her "the new conscience of the U.S. foreign-policy establishment". Okiedoke, I wish her well.

But if our new conscience is recommending surgical military force in Pakistan, I want to go back and take a look at the old conscience. Maybe go real old-school like Walter Mondale, or George McGovern.

...let the auto mechanics and farmers, the roofing contractors and insurance salesmen, the waitresses and students and people who're going to have to put on uniforms and fight these miserable wars join the conversation.

...about a comment (or a post/article) in which someone "with expertise" derided the idea of a dentist or a retail store manager making such important policy decisions. Someone (here, I think-- perhaps one of the Pauls?) stood up for the lowly workers, arguing that they would probably have done a better job (deciding what to do about the war?), given the reality-based nature of their own jobs. Because they were already used to being held accountable.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/6937907.stm

Thursday, 9 August 2007, 02:19 GMT

Pakistan considers emergency rule

[...] Observers believe if Gen Musharraf opts for emergency rule it would primarily affect the powers of the increasingly hostile judiciary, says the BBC's Syed Shoaib Hasan, in Islamabad. It would also allow the president to postpone national elections due to be held later in 2007.

- - BBC News

Addington and Cheney wish they could do likewise.

CO, I couldn't agree more. Ms. Power has impressive credentials, I'd be the first to admit, but I suspect she's never personally suffered the consequences of the sort of momentous decision-making which she so boldly advocates in her book, or recommends to Barack Obama.

She appears to be one of those liberal interventionists which bucky1 is always warning us about, and which both he and I stood against in the late sixties. In this case, I agree with him; she is exactly the sort of person who, in 1966 or thereabouts, would have been found carrying papers in and out of Robert S. McNamara's office. Bright, eager, well-credentialed, and about as trustworthy in matters of life and death as a Mafia consigliere.

In the spirit of ...and God us keep... I recommend that Ms. Power be required to attend a seminar conducted by professor Bebop-o before she's allowed to practice geopolitics with real aircraft carriers.