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The Science of Expertology
 All
the experts agree: Global warming is really
happening, and man is to blame. Only more powerful government (and less
personal freedom) can save us. Slam dunk.
 Observe
that no crisis ever warrants less government and more freedom. So why don’t I
believe in global warming?
Because I get just a
wee bit suspicious when all the experts agree that we should lose our heads
about something and surrender our liberties to the mammoth state. We need
one more science: expertology.
I got my first lesson
in this badly needed discipline when I discovered that all the experts had been
wrong about who “William Shakespeare” was; as it happens,
I’m writing this on So it is in politics.
Our rulers’ authority over us depends heavily on the expertise
available to them, most of it kept secret from the rest of us. The very fact
that we aren’t allowed to know what it is has actually been used as an
argument for trusting them — even when our own common sense says
otherwise! “The president knows more than we do.”
How many times did
we hear that, and say it to each other, at the beginning of the Iraq war? This
allowed our rulers to pull cognitive rank on us and assure us, again and again,
that there was “no doubt” that Saddam Hussein payrolled
terrorists and had weapons of mass destruction — probably nuclear
— so that preemptive war was urgent. After all, that’s what
their experts were telling them: “Slam dunk, Mr. President.”
Neoconservative
pundits, Mecca-nukers, and courtier journalists such as George Will followed
the experts and cried for war. In retrospect, the hysteria is already amazing.
It may have reached its highest pitch in a 2004 book titled, with
metaphysical absurdity, An End to Evil. The authors, both
neocons, were Richard Perle, a certified expert, and David Frum, a journalist
and Bush speechwriter who gave us the phrase axis of evil.
![[Breaker quote for The Science of Expertology: The lesson of Iraq]](2007breakers/070412.gif) The
book enjoyed rave reviews in the
conservative press, notably from Newt Gingrich, now pawing at a presidential
run, in National Review: “a very solid introduction to
serious thinking about the War on Terror and the scale of the threat to the
United States.... Every serious citizen should read it and ponder its
arguments.” (And by the way: “Biological weapons are the
greatest threat we face.”)
And what did this
masterly volume say? Perle and Frum warned that nothing less than
“our survival as a nation” was at stake. Saddam was getting
nukes, plotting with al-Qaeda, et cetera. In the apocalyptic war with Evil, the
two proclaimed, our alternatives were simple: “victory or
holocaust.” Well, by now the holocaust must be at hand!
A skeptical liberal
reviewer commented that Perle and Frum sounded “like Bush on
crack.” Others suggested that they had eaten on the insane root that
takes the reason prisoner; but Patrick Buchanan, while agreeing that the
neocons had “lost their grip on reality,” shrewdly noted the
detailed congruence between the agenda of Perle and Frum and that of Ariel
Sharon’s Likud Party, which Perle had a few years earlier favored with
his expert advice. Now the book favored an American invasion of Syria and
action to foster regime change in Iran.
Over the last half
century, certified experts, with all the can-do self-assurance of the Maytag
repairman changing a gasket in your washing machine, have enticed us into
wars in Vietnam, Panama, Somalia, the Balkans, and the Muslim world, and
they are still very much in business, hoping to finish up in Iran. Soon.
Meanwhile, bills
forbidding Bush to attack Iran without congressional approval have been
stifled in both houses of Congress, not by Republicans but by Democrats
— Charles Schumer in the Senate and Rahm Emmanuel in the House,
both severe critics of the Iraq war. For some reason the news media
haven’t been covering this paradoxical little story.
The neocons now
snort that Bush has bollixed up the war. Not much given to contrition, the
only thing they regret is having trusted Bush. They want to make it clear
that this mess isn’t at all what they had in mind. And if he makes an
even worse mess in Iran, why, that won’t be their fault either. Not
that they seem very worried about it.
Joseph Sobran |
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| Copyright © 2007 by the
Griffin Internet Syndicate, a division of Griffin Communications This column may not be reprinted in print or Internet publications without express permission of Griffin Internet Syndicate 
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