"Experts"

[Tom Odom]

Rory Stewart's take on a famed British Middle East expert comes to mind here.

Expertise isn't everything. Then again, I think one of OIF's lessons is that this maxim is not an excuse for refusing or or ignoring all knowledge of the area in question.

I have for years refused to use the word expert because it is rather like the word "terrorist," completely abused, misused, and consequently trite in application.

As a FAO I was a specialist, meaning I knew more than most and could offer informed insights based on experience and study. Most Middle East FAOs--at least the ones I respected--considered Lawrence to be a flawed model and certainly Gertrude Bell falls into the same camp. A spoiled social poodle with too much time on her hands, she took up mountain climbing and then switched to fashioning Iraq. Funny that --and Rory Stewart makes this point rather well--the acclaim for Bell like that for Lawrence all came from fellow imperialist Brits with a smattering of others thrown in. My own contacts in the region dismissed Lawrence as a "spy" when they were being kind.

On the other hand it was and still is interesting to see and hear people accept pronouncements about regions, peoples, or ideas without ever bothering to shine any kind of intellectual light on those pronouncements. PPT and the 15 second sound bite have only made this tendency more damaging. On a macro level, this is where I have real problems with folks who suggest the Israelis are "Arab experts" based on a half century of continuous conflict.

Tom