Do we need experts?

March 23, 2009 by Rahul Mahajan It was just a throwaway line in President Obamas 60 Minutes interview on Sunday. He was giving Steve Kroft the new conventional wisdom on Afghanistan Iraq was actually easier than Afghanistan. It's easier terrain. You've got a-- much better educated population, infrastructure to build off of and I suddenly said to myself, Do they know anything at all about anything? Its very odd. There has been a great flurry of books, articles, media reports about all the things the United States has learned about counterinsurgency, about how to combine offers of development aid with demands for actionable intelligence, about how a kinder, gentler approach toward the population helps the occupier in the long run, you name it. In fact, U.S. military officials like General David McKiernan have castigated the Europeans for not having learned all the wonderful things we have. Now, I dont know whether Afghanistan is actually harder than Iraq, especially since I dont know what Afghanistan as a problem rather than a country is. But surely its obvious that the better educated population and better infrastructure in Iraq were reasons that Iraq was harder it led to a much quicker growth of resistance and a much wider dissatisfaction with American inability to repair the infrastructure it destroyed. And what exactly does Obama think were in Afghanistan to do? Build infrastructure? One of the main lessons most people have drawn from the Iraq occupation is that we need to understand the Middle East better and concomitantly we need to go back to the triedand-true methods that the foreign policy experts of our prelapsarian days applied so well. That has not been the lesson Ive drawn. It is true that the cabal that plotted the insane venture of destroying a countrys government without an agreed-on plan to replace it with something else knew nothing about the Middle East. And it certainly would have been nice to have the input of experts on the region who could explain to us that Arabs, apparently unlike others, dont like being herded into prison for no reason, stripped naked, taunted, made to simulate masturbation and copulation with each other, and formed into pyramids. And, of course, soldiers could have benefited from experts explaining to them that beating helpless prisoners to death was immoral. But the fact is that Rumsfeld, Cheney, and others were the epitome of the foreign policy expert. Doug Feith points out in his book, I think correctly, that in fact the Rumsfeld wing of things was smarter and more expert than the Colin Powell wing. It just so happens that foreign policy expertise had and has a lot more to do with encyclopedic knowledge of weapons systems, expertise at bureaucratic infighting, and delineation of strategic contingencies in carefully bullet-pointed memos than it has to do with understanding human beings and the world.

The other pillar of the ongoing American debacle, the economic and financial crisis, has occasioned some grumbling about Wall Streets expertise from the margins, but again no sustained critique of the concept of expertise and how it is conceived. Its paradoxical, because all of us who are not economists trying to make head or tail of Paulsens and Geithners various plans to spend trillions of dollars have surely experienced the fugitive thought that expertise is very important. We all know that maintaining the status quo and pretending that it can be maintained is the main wellspring of these policies, but its not that easy to figure out what should be done instead. And yet what a farce financial and economic expertise is. Its very difficult not to laugh when companies like AIG tell us that they need to dole out $165 million in bonuses so they can keep their best and brightest happy and still working for them. Perhaps they and we would have done better if they had populated those posts with people randomly drawn from prison. When Tim Geithner, Larry Summers, and the powers-that-be try to maintain the fiction that they, the macho men of Wall Street, the touts on CNBC, the raters at Moodys who gave AAA ratings to junk, and the whole sordid kit and caboodle of them are still the holders of an expertise that we desperately need, its difficult not to scream. Expertise is important. I am not advocating Cultural-Revolution-style Maoism or Palinstyle Republicanism. The ignorant might well have gotten Iraq right dont invade but figuring out how to deal with possible widespread bank failure probably requires some knowledge and understanding. One thing is crystal clear: we need a public dialogue about how it is that in so many vitally important spheres we construct experts and expertise who are so detached from reality and from human considerations and what can be done about it.