This is just a heads-up to those who have been following the intel
wars/TeamA-TeamB aspect of the Iraq pre-war fix. Patrick Lang has an
article called
"Habakkuk on 'Leo Strauss and the World of Intelligence'"
with links to several other articles on the philosophical history of the intel
wars, including the very hard-to-find article on Leo Strauss,
co-authored by Abram Shulsky of the Office of Special Plans, which is in
Lang's title.
Emptywheel takes up the subject of Straussian (and postmodernist)
philosophy, the neocons, and their attitude toward intelligence in an
essay titled
"Utilitarian Postmodernists and the Office of Special
Plans" on her blog (which is how I found the Lang article). She argues
that some neocons, i.e.
Gary Schmidtt and Abram Shulsky (S+S), having used
philosophical arguments from postmodernism to expose the basic weakness
to deception in public discourse that democracy suffers, then decide in
the rest of their argument, not to take up a refinement or alternative
to democracy, nor to espouse an ethical restraint from deception---but
that they wish to exploit that weakness. So emptywheel takes a position
that holds the neocon intel fixers responsible for much more than just a
flawed analytical method. In fact if one combines her reading of
S+S with that of Habakkuk from the paper at Lang's article, one begins
to suspect that at least part of that talk about rejecting "scientific"
analysis of intelligence --whatever part that isn't accounted for by
geekish naivety-- is itself just a deception operation, aimed at
postitioning the authors in the marketplace as the New Wise Men, easily
recognizable to those looking for a set of intellectual tools, and
simultaneously providing a set of catchphrases to use against their
opposition. After all that philosophy, we wind up right back where a lot
of started---but with the advantage now that
we ain't just
wild-guessing and conspiratorating now.