Wonk Decency
I understand why critics of Bush-era interventionism, the military-industrial complex, etc. might be skeptical that anyone engaging specifically in “defense policy” would be altruistic in their motivations, as opposed to “foreign policy” specialists or other breeds of wonk. But sometimes it gets oddly paranoid. So when Andrew Exum sums up counterinsurgency theory in a sentence (though you should read the whole post) by saying “No one who really understands COIN wants to do it,” Matt Yglesias counters with the old ‘hammer theory’ :
…active engagement in counterinsurgency operations tends to boost demand for counterinsurgency experts while a foreign policy that aimed to avoid such scenarios might reach the conclusion that it can afford to simply ignore the subject. Thus you could see a certain structural bias in COIN circles toward wanting to see COIN-needed situations lurking under every rock.
The review that inspired Exum’s post makes a similar insinuation, describing at length the career trajectories of those to whom “the Long War has been good.” But I think that both of these attitudes fundamentally misunderstand the cognitive dissonance Exum’s trying to convey. It’s not that COIN experts understand intellectually that good news for them is bad news for other people somewhere far away, so they’re trained to nod gravely and intone “But it must be done” at the end of briefings to conceal their inner joy at getting more work. Like specialists in any other policy area, plenty of COIN theorists genuinely care about the problem they’re trying to solve — in this case, restoring order to violence-ravaged neighborhoods — and therefore they’ve acquired the expertise to help solve it. Sure, some of them may also harbor ambition, but ambition and compassion can go hand in hand. (This is one of the premises for republicanism, but I think people who make careers in politics and policy often forget it, which is sad. One has to wonder why they got into the business themselves.)
Part of the problem comes from the tendency to divide foreign-policy thinkers into ideological camps rather than specialties; certainly COIN operates from a particular set of beliefs about goals, but it would be ridiculous to mistake those beliefs for a Foreign Policy Theory of Everything. (This is actually the point of Exum’s post.) So it might be more constructive to analogize it to domestic policy, which suffers less from the confusion of ideology and content. There are plenty of people who have devoted their careers to studying health care, entitlements, single parenting, or any other “crisis” in domestic affairs, for example. In some cases, they tend to share a particular notion of what solutions should be taken. It would be weird to scrutinize them for attempts to “export” these tactics to other issues merely because of their initial success. Why is it different for experts who happen to study things with guns?
The implication is either that COIN theorists don’t know their own field well enough to understand when a situation falls beyond it, or that people who specialize in Bad Situations will always wind up succumbing to self-interest to perpetuate or invent circumstances that will keep them in demand. That’s just creepy, regardless of what kind of expert you’re talking about.
urm, what? does anyone think that people at AEI or Cato or CPAC are unbiased experts? Even forget the fact that their jobs depend on pushing a certain political agenda. No one in the history of the universe has undersold the utility of their own life work. This is so obviously true it shouldn’t need to be said.
Your confusion is that you seem to think structural bias is inconsistent with sincerity. It is not.
— raft · Mar 5, 05:03 AM · #
I think America in general is way, way too systematically biased in favor of military solutions, even now. And I even kind of suspect that there’s a “mean society” effect here, in that those professions that center on violent coercion (police, military) are going to tend to see the world in terms of conflict, which not only colors your own perspective but tends to encourage everyone else, ally and adversary alike, to prepare for violence. For this reason, predictive and normative beliefs about conflict are always going to be kind of mixed up together, and specialties and ideology will end up correlated.
That said, I’m kind of leaning towards Exum’s POV on this. I mean, it doesn’t seem like all the COIN guys are jumping up and down excitedly “oh boy i can’t wait to try Afganistan now!” They seem more scared than I am. And I’m scared.
That said, I think the line of thinking above is wrong:
It would be weird to scrutinize them for attempts to “export” these tactics to other issues merely because of their initial success.
I don’t find this weird at all. Of course the teacher wants more schools, the doctor wants better medicine, the civil engineer wants better roads, the astronaut wants bigger rockets. And like raft said, they might even sincerely think they’re best for everyone. They see something that works in their specialty, so they want more of it. Or as Hayek puts it “In our predilections and interests we are all in some measure specialists. And we all think that our personal order of values is not merely personal, but that in a free discussion among rational people we would convince the others that ours is the right one.”
— Consumatopia · Mar 5, 05:51 AM · #