When my brother and I were teenagers, my dad used to have a joke about how we should be made to hold up “irony” signs when we said something around the dinner table that we didn’t intend to take seriously. Maybe I should start using one for Noah Pollack’s benefit. He’s apparently an admirer of the work of Martin Kramer, who holds the view that the mainstream of the field of Middle East Studies does bad work. Or, as Pollack puts it, that “they’ve become enamored of post-colonial academic fads.” Because Kramer thinks their work is bad, he takes the view that the views of mainstream scholars in the field should be marginalized in our discourse and our policy process.

I disagree, and glossed this ironically as the view that “the problem with U.S. Middle East policy is that it’s unduly influenced by people who are knowledgeable about the Middle East.”Pollack then decides to prove that if you take that literally, it’s not literally true.

At any rate, if you were sitting around in December 2001 looking at the dispute between the Middle East Studies mainstream and the Kramer-style revisionist camp, you might have a hard time making up your mind. The mainstream is the mainstream, and there’s a lot to be said for following the academic consensus. The consensus, however, could be wrong. Maybe academic fashion really has just gone astray. Fortunately, though, we’ve actually had the experiencing of living now for the past five or six years in a country that’s made drastic policy decisions in the Middle East that have been heavily influenced by interpretations favored by people and institutions — Bernard Lewis, Daniel Pipes, Martin Kramer, the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, etc. — firmly in the revisionist camp. It’s all turned out to be a huge disaster.

By contrast, while mainstream Middle East Studies folks (Juan Cole and Marc Lynch probably the ones best-known to the blogosphere) haven’t been right about everything, their commentary over these years has held up quite well. It looks like maybe the mainstream views are mainstream because they’re correct! It’s also telling that in many respects what Middle East Studies scholars have been telling us about the Bush administration’s policies is broadly similar to what international relations scholars have been telling us. But as I say, at this point the proof is in the pudding, and the revisionist pudding is terrible.

The whole business of calling people chickenhawks has fallen into disrepute but I, for one, enjoy it greatly. What’s more, it’s precisely things like this Hitchens passage that Julian and Ross are discussing that leads to anti-chickenhawk dogmatism. Check it out, but this time with my emphasis added:

In order to get my own emotions out of the way, I should say briefly that on that day I shared the general register of feeling, from disgust to rage, but was also aware of something that would not quite disclose itself. It only became fully evident quite late that evening. And to my surprise (and pleasure), it was exhilaration. I am not particularly a war lover, and on the occasions when I have seen warfare as a traveling writer, I have tended to shudder. But here was a direct, unmistakable confrontation between everything I loved and everything I hated. On one side, the ethics of the multicultural, the secular, the skeptical, and the cosmopolitan. (Those are the ones I love, by the way.) On the other, the arid monochrome of dull and vicious theocratic fascism. I am prepared for this war to go on for a very long time. I will never become tired of waging it, because it is a fight over essentials. And because it is so interesting.

Now say it with me: which war, exactly, was Hitchens waging? He’s not waging a war at all, he’s sitting at a desk writing magazine articles and Slate columns and drinking just like the rest of us. He isn’t waging war, he’s advocating that other people wage war. Which is fine, as far as it goes, but he’s saying that part of the reason he’s advocating that other people wage war is that he enjoys imagining himself as a warrior.

I would be fascinated to see someone (someone at The New Republic, perhaps) try to write an article about why this is a good idea:

The new aid to Israel will average $3 billion a year on a sliding scale, an increase of about 25 percent from current figures, to begin in October 2008. That year, American economic aid to Israel, which has a vibrant, growing economy, is scheduled to end. Uniquely, officials said, the new deal allows Israel to spend 26.3 percent of the aid on arms from Israel’s domestic military industry; the rest of the money must be spent on American equipment.

The New York Times‘s Steve Erlanger hints here at the odd specter of a gigantic increase in aide to a country with a vibrant, growing economy. He doesn’t note that the baseline level already made Israel the country’s largest aid recipient. And Israel is, of course, not a poor country. It is, of course, a democracy. But so is Bangladesh — a country with many more citizens and much less money. But not only is Israel’s giant aid package getting substantially larger, it’s “uniquely” going to allow “26.3 percent of the aid on arms from Israel’s domestic military industry.” The standard military aid package requires all the money to be spent on US defense contractors, making it half partially a subsidy to a foreign country, partially a subsidy to American arms manufacturers.

There’s some indication in the article, meanwhile, that Steny Hoyer and other Democrats may raise objections not to this aid package but to the “don’t call it a quid pro quo” complementary package of arms sales to the Gulf monarchies. And thus both parties continue in the quest to be more slavishly in hock to AIPAC.

I love Fred Kaplan’s devastating takedown of Rudy Giuliani’s Foreign Affairs manifesto, but I think it’s misleading to frame the problems with Rudy’s worldview as a kind of ignorance or childishness. The piece reflects the views of a substantial and influential group of people. I’d be inclined to dismiss the Norman Podhoretzes and Charles Krauthammers of the world as merely ignorant, since their ideas don’t make any sense, but they’ve been at this long enough that they know what they’re doing.

A merely ignorant Giuliani would be worrying, but what we actually see here is a man deeply invested in a deeply wrongheaded worldview which, I think, is much more dangerous. To observers looking on from the outside, the Bush administration has been a case study in neoconservative folly. To neoconservatives themselves, however, the Bush administration has been a study in betrayal. They’re brilliant ideas have been compromised at every turn by the president’s wavering attention, by liberals in congress, by Arabists in the State Department, etc., etc., etc. Giuliani represents precisely that point of view — the kind of people who think Bush’s big mistake was not listening to Perle and Frum in An End to Evil.

Would Giuliani actually govern this way? It’s impossible to say for sure, but one has to take seriously the possibility that he’s not only signaling a desire to implement policies more militaristic, more hostile to professionals at State and the CIA, more dismissive of the UN, less friendly to Palestinians, etc. than has George W. Bush. There are people — lots and lots of people — who think Bush abandonned the True Path sometime in 2004 and that what the country needs is to get back on track. Giuliani’s roster of advisers and now his essay indicate that he wants to be the candidate for those people. That should scare you.