I realize I already did a nitpick piece on David Brooks this week, but he's got another column of disingenuous B.S. that really needs to be shredded. If you remember from last time, Mr. Brooks was worried that elections have become a "postmodernist literary critic's idea of heaven". But now, in his new column discussing the "problems at CIA", Brooks looks suspiciously like one of those pomo fluffheads:
The C.I.A.'s scientific pretensions were established early on by Sherman Kent. In his 1949 book "Strategic Intelligence for American World Policy," Kent argued that the truth is to be approached through a systematic method, "much like the method of the physical sciences."This was at a time, just after the war, when economists, urban planners and social engineers believed that human affairs could be understood scientifically, and that the social sciences could come to resemble hard sciences like physics.
If you read C.I.A. literature today, you can still see scientism in full bloom. The tone is cold, formal, depersonalized and laden with jargon. You can sense how the technocratic process has factored out all those insights that may be the product of an individual's intuition and imagination, and emphasized instead the sort of data that can be processed by an organization.
This false scientism was bad enough during the cold war, when the intelligence community failed to anticipate seemingly nonrational events like the Iran-Iraq war or the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. But it is terrible now in the age of terror, because terror is largely nonrational.
And because the CIA's traditional intelligence methodologies are ridden with problematical presuppositions and the decentering action of differance, because they assume an externally valid and eternal truth that one could discern, because they are rational, we must eschew them and adopt, instead, the methods of "political hacks". Remember, Brooks argues terror is "largely nonrational", so the only way to combat it is by adopting irrational means of investigation.
There are two incredible errors here. First, the assertion that terror is "nonrational". It's a right-wing spin point, designed to turn the "war on terror" into something like a religious war, and to block understanding. People who are politically, economically, and militarily disenfranchised will resort to asymmetric warfare, which we call "terror" when the other side uses it. When we use it, we call it "revolution". What is so irrational about using the only tools available to you?
The second error is compounded on the first. Because terror is "irrational" to Brooks, he argues that it's more effective to trust individual, intuitive judgments over organizational, scientific ones. "I'd trust individuals over organizations. Individuals can use intuition, experience and a feel for the landscape of reality," he writes, blithely unaware of the tremendous bias that a single person's analyses may contain. Essentially, he's asking us to trust the intuitions and claims of people like Ahmed Chalabi and Dick Cheney over the collective intelligence of numerous specialists who can correct each other's erroneous assumptions.
Unmentioned in Brooks's column is the Office of Special Plans, which seems to be the guilty party in all of this intelligence cookery. And the OSP acts exactly as Brooks wants it to: a small group of politically motivated actors, cherry-picking the intelligence to arrive at the ideologically satisfactory conclusions. That's the real goal of Brooks's anti-scientism -- he wants intelligence to be an arm of propaganda.
Posted by Chris at February 3, 2004 09:52 AM