Why Faking A Surprise?

I wrote couple of times about Max Boot. Now people in TAC recalled him and all for the wrong reason of Boot's party affiliation. Hint: Boot's party affiliation is Israel and, generally, with settling whatever accounts he has with his place of birth, Russia that is. But while paying attention to Boot's party affiliation's ambiguity, which, under present circumstances, is absolutely irrelevant (it was GOP which gave birth and brought up fanatics of neocon variety), the author of the piece makes a good observation:

Max Boot first came to public notice, or at least to mine, during the run-up to the Iraq war. He had persuaded a television producer somewhere to label him a “Defense Expert,” which, in the natural order of things, caused some people to mistake him for a defense expert. He had never been involved in even minor military operations himself, but he seemed uncontained in his enthusiasm for military operations involving other people. As the country debated the merits of an expedition to Iraq, Max Boot seemed to be everywhere. He was in every room. While he was rarely the most influential voice in any of those rooms, he was almost always the loudest. Among his several asseverations, all of them unburdened by either evidence or experience, were these: an American invasion would rid Iraq of nuclear weapons. (Iraq had no nuclear weapons.) An American invasion would cause the Iraqis to rise up and greet us as liberators. (They rose up and fought us as invaders.) An American invasion would bring democratic stability to a troubled region. (It brought chaos.) An American military victory would be quick and decisive. (After 16 years and incalculable losses in blood, treasure, prestige, and morale, the American military is still in Iraq.)

Ah, that's warmer. But it is distinction without a difference--I am talking about highlighted in yellow. I have a question to ask: and how is GOP different in respect to evidence or experience in anything real war related? Max Boot may be vomit inducing neocon, but the armies of "military experts" in GOP are the same breed of humanities "educated" ignoramuses from Ivy League degree mills and who wouldn't be allowed in any serious armed forces, despite their numerous Ph.Ds in God knows what useless for real war and foreign policy degrees, to be in charge of toilets in the company's barracks or on the frigate size ship. 

I don't understand what is so important about Boot's affiliation when decision, as an example, to attack Iraq (just for the sake of argument) was made inside Republican Administration and its courtier of "military experts" who can easily be called clones of Max Boot. Max Boot, the same as people who pushed through the invasion of Iraq both in the government and media are to warfare what I am to Chinese choreography or quantum mechanics. How about the author of the piece in TAC admits that for all Boot's despicable incompetence, things stated about him in the article equally apply to most of American "elites" their party affiliation notwithstanding. Incompetence and dual loyalties is what defines them and it, in this case, becomes merely an exercise in futility trying to sort out different sorts of shit.  

You Gotta Love Tucker.

Just as I finished my expose' on all kinds of Russian military so called "experts" (pardon me--frauds) nine days ago, Tucker Carlson started asking those most important, bottom-line, expertise questions about America's very own military "experts" such as Max Boot and Bill Kristol in The American Conservative. Tucker gets to heavy artillery really fast: 

One thing that every late-stage ruling class has in common is a high tolerance for mediocrity. Standards decline, the edges fray, but nobody in charge seems to notice. They’re happy in their sinecures and getting richer. In a culture like this, there’s no penalty for being wrong. The talentless prosper, rising inexorably toward positions of greater power, and breaking things along the way. It happened to the Ottomans. Max Boot is living proof that it’s happening in America. Boot is a professional foreign policy expert, a job category that doesn’t exist outside of a select number of cities. Boot has degrees from Berkeley and Yale, and is a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. He has written a number of books and countless newspaper columns on foreign affairs and military history. The International Institute for Strategic Studies, an influential British think tank, describes Boot as one of the “world’s leading authorities on armed conflict.” None of this, it turns out, means anything. The professional requirements for being one of the world’s Leading Authorities on Armed Conflict do not include relevant experience with armed conflict. Leading authorities on the subject don’t need a track record of wise assessments or accurate predictions. All that’s required are the circular recommendations of fellow credential holders. If other Leading Authorities on Armed Conflict induct you into their ranks, you’re in. That’s good news for Max Boot.

The very notion that one must have academic (yes, military sciences are really physics-mathematics and engineering sciences in the foundation) and military, especially command, experience to even utter a sensible word on anything related to armed conflict, somehow doesn't exist in modern, post-truth, world. I remember one humanities-"educated" hack who saw weapons only in pictures and who wouldn't know the difference between attrition models on the land and on the sea, preaching to me that cadre officers cannot have good understanding of strategy. So, today, it seems, in order to become a military "expert" one needs a degree in economics or sociology, or in theater. So, Tucker hits target here really well. In general, it is an excellent piece by one of few remaining sane voices in D.C. But in the end Tucker gives a grim assessment of the situation, same way as I am trying to make a case for the last few years: the state of American military science, strategic assessments, military analysis, military history is dire--the field is occupied by insane and illiterate people who pass judgements on subjects they have no clue about and they really don't care. As Tucker notes about another mindless and illiterate war-monger Kristol:

By the spring of 2018, Kristol was considering a run for president himself. He was still making the case for the invasion of Iraq, as well as pushing for a new war, this time in Syria, and maybe in Lebanon and Iran, too. Like most people in Washington, he’d learned nothing at all.

As I said many times, political "scientists", lawyers, most journalists and political "strategists" do not make good "experts" in armed conflict or any other field which requires serious effort in obtaining actual applicable skills. This especially rings true for ones who exist in a Washington's echo chamber which increasingly begins to look like a padded room for violent patients in the asylum.