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This is the wrong framing. It wasn’t “experts” who urged on the Iraq war; it was *political elites* and their *pundit supporters*—who ignored what the actual experts were saying, which was that the war would almost certainly produce a humanitarian & strategic disaster. A Thread…
When that prediction of disaster came true, the political elites and pundits engaged in epic blame-shifting. The first pass was trying to pin it on the “faulty intelligence,” then on the incompetence of military leaders, then on the ungrateful Iraqis themselves... 2/
Over time, as in the OP, a consensus emerged that some unspecified group of “experts” were to blame. This vague narrative is not just wrong, it has had disastrous political consequences. 3/
This narrative as, first, shifted the blame away from those truly responsible, namely: the Bush regime’s senior leaders, the neocon chickenhawk commentariat, and their craven fellow travelers among the Democrats. These people should all have been drummed out of public life. 4/
Just as bad, the narrative that “experts” were to blame for Iraq (rather than a failed class of political elites) has been central to the catastrophic denigration of expertise as such that has ensured over the last decade or so. 5/
Actual experts on the Gulf, people like @jricole, knew perfectly well that the war was overwhelming likely to produce a disaster, and said so very publicly. So did CIA experts behind closed doors. They were mocked, ignored, and in some cases threatened. 6/
No, the real problem was not “bad experts”; it was an awful political class (these people: msnbc.com/msnbc/10-years…) who ignored the real experts, as well as a “useful idiots” commentariat who falsely claimed expertise, people like Hitchens, Sullivan, Remnick, etc. 7/
This latter list is extremely long. It includes people like @JonahNRO, @MaxBoot, @BillKristol, virtually everyone associated with @NRO, with @AEI, and so on. Any proper political reckoning would have rightly cost all these people their careers in public life. 8/
That is of course precisely the reason why the reckoning never happened: the vast majority of the entire political class as well as most of the chattering class were complicit or worse in the Iraq debacle. The constituency for house cleaning was smaller than the pile of turd. 9/
Please don’t reinforce those political perpetrators’ own self-exculpatory narrative by blaming “experts.” People with actual knowledge knew full well that the Iraq War would be a catastrophe. Blaming “experts” for what was a *political* failure only makes things worse. 10/10
