Echelon Above Reality

I enjoyed the fight between Jonah Goldberg and Juan Cole. It was nice to see Cole get a thrashing from his social and educational inferior, that peasant Jonah. Kind of like Braveheart sticking it to the king.

Cole was as thoroughly unprofessional as Golberg was reasonable. Cole chose to wave his engorged C.V. about to deny Jonah even had the right to engage him in debate. Sadly, all the oxygen left Cole's brain in the process.

Seriously, I have no doubt that Cole knows a great deal about Middle Eastern history. I'm sure his defense of his thesis on the evolving trade routes in semi-dried figs in upper northern Yemen (or whatever it was) is discussed in hushed tones in coffee bars wherever grad students meet.

I'll not pile on the ridiculous resort to authority that Cole relied on in the debate. If this was truly believed we'd just measure the C.V.s, declare a winner, and then follow them unto the gates of Hell.

I do wish to note the tremendous error Cole makes in assuming that knowing that mullah X is 5% less wacky than mullah Y and that they have a 98.5% overlap in Standard Hypothesized Interest Trends means that his solutions to current problems are by definition based on facts and therefore correct. If Cole was wrong about the way the world works when he was but a lad, adding a PhD to his name did not add anything to his ability to analyze. He has lots of facts and may be able to address the history of his speciality but outside of that he needs to defend his position like any mere peasant.

Sometimes it seems that once a person studies an area sufficiently, they get so bogged down in understanding the finer differences between 10th century Medina Islam and 13th century Egyptian Islam (or to be fair, knowing the differences between an M-2 and M-3 Bradley) that they think mastery of the details is the same as understanding the big picture and having solutions to our problems. Just as higher headquarters can be cut off from the reality of combat that their instructions seem to come from an echelon above reality, experts such as Cole get lost in the weeds.

I'm sure there is an internally consistent model that categorically proves, as Cole asserts, that Iran's most recent farce of an election was more democratic than Iraq's was this year.

Sadly for Cole, a command of the bleeding obvious trumps his expertise and purported command of Arabic.

Advantage: Goldberg.