- Discussion has picked up again on Elizabeth Saunders’ guest post, “How Would Al Gore Have Fought the Iraq War.” I think it worth clarifying that Elizabeth’s piece does, as I read it, two things. First, it extends the debate by asking, in essence, “if we believe that parallel-universe President Gore would have launched an attack against Iraq, what would that war have been like?” She concludes that it might have been better prosecuted than the real-world Bush version. Second, she undercuts the thesis of the book by pointing to ex ante evidence that Gore would have engaged in different cost-benefit calculations abou the war itself.
- I agree, however, that the “Gore invades Iraq” argument is very difficult to sustain, as I discussed in comments at The Glittering Eye way back in 2007. The politics of this debate are interesting, though. In essence, now that everyone pretty much agrees that invading Iraq was a bad idea for the United States, the argument shifts from “look at how superior the Bush Administration is because it is willing to confront the threat posed by Saddam Hussein” to “but Democrats would have done it as well.”
- Reza Aslan’s interview with Fox News anchor Lauren Green has gotten a lot of discussion along the lines of ‘Aslan pwnd Green’ and ‘Fox News looks terrible,’ although right-wing new media continues to howl about aspects of the book. As an aside, claims such as “Jesus wasn’t born in Bethlehem” are pretty standard fare in debates about the historicity of the Gospels, and pretty widely accepted by a wide variety of scholars. So the issues here really do seem to be that (1) Aslan is a Muslim and that (2) because he’s a Muslim, people who otherwise ignore much of the relevant scholarly debate are suddenly confronting a popularization of it and freaking out. Regardless, PTJ has it right that the interview supports the importance of drawing a distinction between science and politics as vocations.
And also:
- On a related note, Idean Salehyan, Jay Ulfelder, and Chris Clary have interesting things to say about forecasting, foreign-policy making, and ethics. Oddly enough, the participants get pretty close to noting the performativity problem involved (or, if you prefer, “interactive kinds” issue), but don’t really confront it directly. Obviously, it isn’t just a matter of “false positives”: how actors respond to forecasting models can shape outcomes, and hence our assessment of the models, and hence outcomes.
Thanks Dan. One clarification: I think a hypothetical Gore war (though highly, highly unlikely) would have had a different strategy, but I’m not sure it would have been better prosecuted than Bush, though the bar is so low that it is hard to imagine another administration failing to clear it. It is also not clear that a Gore nation-building intervention would have been successful in transforming Iraq, a project that may have been doomed under any administration. But as you note, I do look at the counterfactual of what a Gore war might have looked like, which in turns feeds into the ex ante evidence for why he might have made
different cost-benefit calculations that might have kept him out of the war in
the first place. If you believe that a nation-building intervention is the “right” way to fight a war in Iraq, you will evaluate the costs and benefits of such a war and may well conclude that it will be too difficult, whereas a different president who favored a more surgical approach would make a different cost-benefit assessment and, like Bush, might decide to go in.
Overall, I too am highly skeptical of claims that Gore would have invaded Iraq. The Democrats’ reaction to Bush putting Iraq on the agenda in the post-9/11 environment is different from Democrats like Gore putting Iraq on the agenda themselves, and the latter is difficult to imagine. My point in addressing Harvey’s counterfactual of a Gore war is that there are multiple paths to avoiding war, and Gore’s views of threats and how to address those threats might have led him to avoid war for particular reasons tied to his beliefs. These are by no means the only reasons why Gore or another president would have stayed out of Iraq, however. Another point I make in the Perspectives piece is that while Harvey argues that a Democratic president would have had a hard time avoiding war because of political pressure, there is no guarantee that Gore would have allowed things to go that far, and he also would have had options for extricating himself. In line with arguments that the public will follow an elite consensus and might not punish leaders for backing down in crises if they explain themselves (as Michael Horowitz and Matthew Levendusky have found), Gore might have been able to forge an elite consensus in favor of keeping the inspection regime in place and avoiding war. I am also skeptical of the argument that the public “wanted” war—again, the public might have rallied behind the idea of a war once it was on the agenda, but that is not the same as bottom-up pressure for war in Iraq specifically. Harvey’s book is useful in reminding us that there were structural pressures that any president would have faced, but it is difficult to avoid the influence of leaders in the case of Iraq.
Just out of curiosity, does anyone here know Aslan’s status as a scholar on religions? I found only one refereed publication by him: a chapter in an edited volume (albeit an Oxford handbook). All of his books are with commercial presses and I can’t find any journal articles. Do we understand someone who doesn’t contribute to scholarly discourses to be a scholar nonetheless? Would we call someone who simply popularises existing scholarly perspectives a public intellectual or something else?
That sounds like the opening to a long discussion and debate. I’d say that, yes, Aslan seems to be a popularizer. But I’d also say that scholarship is a disposition, and popularization plays a role in the overall enterprise.
‘Disposition’ is a good way to describe it, and I think it does mean we include Aslan within the category of ‘scholar’. Should we differentiate between scholar and academic, then? The former is a disposition, but the latter is an institutional and professional role. And if Aslan doesn’t contribute to academic discussions of religion but holds a position as a professor of creative writing (a position often held by successful popular writers with no scholarly disposition), is he an academic?
I’m poking around this line of questioning because while I’ve seen Aslan give some very good commentary in other settings,* I was a bit uncomfortable with the extent of his own-horn-tooting in that travesty of an interview and with some of the claims he made as to his own expert status.
*To be fair, demolishing Sam Harris is a bit like shooting a very angry duck in a barrel, but Aslan still did it with worthy sophistication.