Smart People: Always Right, Even When They Change Their Mind

Via Oliver Kamm, the New York Times reports:

“Mr. Obama’s top advisers say they no longer believe the key finding of a much disputed National Intelligence Estimate about Iran, published a year before President George W. Bush left office, which said that Iranian scientists ended all work on designing a nuclear warhead in late 2003.

Hilarious. All that talk back in ’07 about that NIE is mostly down the memory-hole, of course. So no one will really notice this complete 180.

Remember, at the time of that ‘National Intelligence Estimate’, all the Smart People were required to believe it (or at least, they pretended to). Anyone who didn’t believe it was dumb.

Now we have a leak from Obama’s top advisers – Smart People Central – essentially admitting that they think the NIE was crap. The fact that this is phrased as them ‘no longer believing’ it is classic Smart People. They weren’t wrong back then, you see, they just believed the NIE. And now they don’t. They were right then to believe it, and now they’re right not to. They’re always, always right. Because they’re Smart.

One thing Smart People value above truth, you see, is the entrenched authority of experts. The NIE was an official document, produced by official people, by experts, therefore it was correct and everyone had an obligation to bow to its findings. The prospect of people not believing an official document such as the NIE at the time it was issued was more frightening to Smart People than the possibility that the NIE was actually false (which Smart People didn’t really care about).

The reason Smart Peoples’ priorities are this way is because Smart People know that they, and people who think like them, can control the processes, politics, and official pathways that produce documents such as the NIE. This is the same reason Smart People are threatened by Fox News and other outlets that aren’t “real journalism”: because Smart People control journalism schools and the journalistic establishment, but they don’t control Fox News, Free Republic, or blogs. Similarly, Smart People control the ‘peer review’ processes by which Global Warming papers are accepted and anti-Global Warming papers are rejected, so they constantly strive to ensure that only these products are accepted as truth (regardless of whether they are).

What Smart People care about more than most other things is that the process by which they – Smart People – are enshrined as respected, honored, and remunerated decision-makers stays in place. Whether what comes out of that process is right or true is of far lesser importance than that it be accepted by everyone as right and true. So naturally, they don’t care that much about the ‘being right’ part, nor so much as blush in embarrassment when they’re not.

UPDATE: Via Google, in a link others have apparently found, here’s what my arch nemesis Matthew Yglesias had to say about the NIE back in 2007,

Keep in mind that the contents of this NIE have been known to the Bush administration for over a year. Under the circumstances, the push for Kyl-Lieberman and similar measures looks an awful lot like a deliberate effort to change the subject away from Iran’s alleged nuclear program specifically because the main actors in the administration knew their case on this point was about to collapse.

And indeed, the ‘case’ was about to collapse. Because ‘cases’, as everyone knows, are made and built by Smart People using Official documents and other sorts of things only created by and gatekeeped by Experts. Things that may or may not be true, but are Official (and Smart). Yglesias cheered it on when the ‘case’ collapsed because he cared about process and effects (=preventing the US using military force against Iran), not truth. Does it matter to him, then, that the NIE may have been wrong? No evidence of it yet.

Yglesias also quotes Candidate Obama saying this, although I didn’t find corroboration:

By reporting that Iran halted its nuclear weapon development program four years ago because of international pressure, the new National Intelligence Estimate makes a compelling case for less saber-rattling and more direct diplomacy. [...] The new National Intelligence Estimate shows that George Bush and Dick Cheney’s rush to war with Iran is, in fact, a rush to war. The new NIE finds that Iran halted its nuclear weapons program in 2003 and that Iran can be dissuaded from pursuing a nuclear weapon through diplomacy.

Now that Obama & co “no longer believe” the NIE, are we to understand therefore that the case for less saber-rattling and more direct diplomacy has become less compelling? That the rush to war wasn’t in fact a rush to war? And that Iran can’t be dissuaded from pursuing nuclear weapons through diplomacy?

Well, logic would dictate that yes, we are. But you see, Bush is no longer the President, so it’s no longer as important to score these rhetorical points as it once was. With military action no longer even a remotely plausible contingency, they can be safely dropped down the memory hole, and Smart People everywhere can safely admit to never having believed them in the first place. Situational! Smart!