More "Decoding" Posted by Ilan Goldenberg

Atrios takes issue with my “decoding” of the VSP community.  I agree with his main point that this problem shouldn’t exist at all and the VSPs should hold “experts” up to a higher standard and make them pay for saying stupid stuff.  But they don’t so what do we do about it?

You could just throw everyone out and not listen to any of these guys because they are full of it.  In my view that would be a shame.  There is a use for expertise.  Experts’ opinions should not be the absolute be all and end all, but people should have an opportunity to listen to someone who reads the Arabic press every morning, has spent years living in the region, devotes their career to these issues and for the most part has been right on important questions like the war in Iraq. 

So, here’s my proposal.  You can have some people in the blogosphere make the decoding easier for everyone.  People who pay attention to this stuff regularly (Like some of the more notable bloggers and their readerships.) could work to come up with a list of good experts on various issues.  This expert list should include people who really know what they are talking about, but don’t get enough attention.  Then, maybe guys like Atrios, with their massive readerships can spend more time linking to these experts and helping raise their profiles.  It’s easy to link to O’Hanlon and say he sucks.  But why not link to Brian Katulis or Steven Simon when they write excellent reports and op-eds on Iraq?

It’s easy to complain that the wrong people are getting air time. But unless you are able to offer the producer an alternative expert who can fill those two minutes they are going to continue to default to what they know.  If we can help build up some new faces, we can get rid of some of the old ones and we can also send a clear message that people need to be held accountable for what they say.

Comments

[Don Bacon]

Sounds good to me Ilan. Very good. We need to hear from more people. The web works beautifully because, unlike print and broadcast, it has a built-in inherent BS filter where readers can appraise every statement and agree or disagree, and if the latter then the onus is on them to present the facts. Some "experts" will have trouble with this, like one I won't name who recently took offense at people who disagreed with him/her and didn't come back to a blog. Couldn't take the heat.

Every expert or blogger has the potential to mis-state the facts or offer a faulty opinion, and when this happens there should be a corrective statement, and from this interplay the truth we all seek will emerge.

"Let us settle ourselves, and work and wedge our feet downward through the mud and slush of opinion, and prejudice, and tradition, and delusion, and appearance, that alluvion which covers the globe, through Paris and London, through New York and Boston and Concord, through church and state, through poetry and philosophy and religion, till we come to a hard bottom and rocks in place, which we can call reality, and say, This is, and no mistake;"--Henry David Thoreau, Walden

[Lupin]

I wouldn't mind seeing any right-wing pundit appearance balanced with one by Noah Chomsky, for instance.

[jayackroyd]

Yes, it would be good to have links to real experts. People do frequently link to Juan Cole.

And let's stick with Juan Cole for just a minute. He's clearly more expert on these issues than the people who turn up on television. He is a professor at a major university, comments prolifically in public and knows the issues inside and out, certainly better than O'Hanlon. It simply isn't credible, especially after the flap over his appointment to Yale, that competent news producers and op-ed page editors don't know who he is.

By any reasonable measure, he would be a very serious person. But, and this is atrios' point I'm stealing, he pretty clearly believes that the war was a mistake to wage and has been waged incompetently with little regard for the actual situation in Iraq. And because he holds this position--in particular because he doesn't trumpet the effectiveness of force as the most desireable solution, he is not a Very Serious Person.

The point isn't that there are other experts that who would do a better job of analysis. The point is that producers and op-ed editors aren't interested in those points of view unless, as far as I can tell, they come from active or retired military men who are not named Scott Ritter. The problem is not really Pollack or O'Hanlon themselves. If Pollack recanted tomorrow, said he has been wrong all along and that precipitous withdrawal is the only way out, he wouldn't get shown all over cable news saying so. Just as Cordesman's much more balanced review of his visit didn't get the same play.

The issue is not the experts. The issue is the narrative. The story the producers want is "surge makes progress." What makes Pollack and O'Hanlon contemptible is that they, in my opinon, obviously, know what the narrative is that will get them the attention they desire--"anti-war critics see progress"---and exploit it, even thought it is entirely false. And the producers put them on, even though they have been entirely wrong, because that is the story they want to broadcast.

You're not gonna fix that with a better blogroll at Eschaton.

In addition, just as producers have their ways of working, the blogosphere also has its way of working--and that entails a certain degree of pithiness. Cole is very good at this, but IME real experts usually aren't. If you really know a subject, it is hard to distill its essence for a lay audience. Yesterday's NYT op-ed by the six non-coms did a really spectacular job of doing that. But much more common is either the craptastic bombast from people like Friedman (running on the opposite page) or lengthy, closely reasoned but dense white papers.

I kind of like the acronym, VSP. Might as well adopt it. The irony is that the VSP was ignored in the runup to the Iraq war because political agendas trumped the value of their advice; now the same thing is happening, since the VSP is largely measured in its critiques and simply not on the same page (as far as any concensus can be described) about total withdrawal from Iraq as the leftist blogger camp is (Atrios, et al). For example, Anthony Cordesman's report this month from Iraq is titled, "The Tenuous Case for Strategic Patience in Iraq". That's hardly a full-throa