great find yourself, I'll read it with interest. always curious to see how people portray their own intellectual journey.
I know John pretty well, and regard him in somewhat the same way as I do Bob Kagan. That is, both of them are very smart, very knowledgeable people with very extreme, but entirely sincere, views. Always worth reading, sometimes convincing, but sometimes (to my eyes) dangerously wacky. The fact that they have diametrically opposed views (realist and neocon, respectively) only makes it more fun.
One thing I dislike about both of them, however--something that is probably not unconnected to their self-perceptions as embattled loners fighting for truth and justice against a horde of craven idiots--is the way that they can rather easily slip into questioning the motives and character of those who disagree with them.
In the section you quote, for example, Mearsheimer and Walt clearly state that the people who "portray Saddam as an inveterate and only partly rational aggressor" do so because "they are in the business of selling a preventive war" and so must "inflate the threat, either by exaggerating Iraq's capabilities or by suggesting that horrible things will happen if we do not act soon." They also are "willing to distort the historical record in order to make their case."
Now there are many people, senior administration officials high among them, who have indeed inflated threats, exaggerated capabilities, distorted the historical record, and so forth in order to "sell" the war on Iraq. But the clear target of this particular piece is Ken Pollack, who is quoted by name and who has been the chief intellectual purveyor of the anti-deterrence line. As anybody who bothers to look at Pollack's book can tell, however, this is not someone who--whether one agrees with him or not--is guilty of those particular crimes. To accuse him of such, therefore, is to lower the level of debate to a very mean and nasty personal level without any justification--something quite on a part with the neocons' frequent slandering of opponents of war as appeasing scum, traitors, anti-Americans, etc.
With Mearsheimer, part of this is just personal style. He's not exactly full of the social graces. (At a conference once he said to me casually that the problem with my generation in the field was that we were all "pussies.") But it can morph into something less forgivable if one is not careful.
tb@pussiesRus.com |
