The great thinker and political commentator Walter Lippmann extolled the virtues of the ‘expert’ in American political life, in a mass society in the 20th Century: a misplaced faith? One need only read Mr. Leslie Gelb’s latest piece at The Daily Beast entitled ‘Mission Accomplished’ to understand our dire predicament as citizens of a Republic, under a concerted attack by the agents of Empire and their intellectual rationalizers. Here is the manufactured, self-congratulatory political chatter of one of those well placed rationalizers. In his essay he fashions himself as the middle ground, the rational alternative to both left and right positions on the war in Afghanistan. He is not above questioning the sanity of his political antagonists , he has taken the high road, rhetorically speaking. Mr. Gelb is impressive in his use of statistical data to bolster his argument along with the nugget of information that he regularly speaks with White House policy makers, this to give credence to his arguments, as based in a superior knowledge, not readily available to ordinary citizens. Mr. Gelb’s is the voice of the well connected technocrat, here, able in this vortex of data and policy argument to articulate his own moral vacuity, the ethical void at the center of the mechanism of policy construction; himself. He does not and cannot speak of the human costs of war, it is beyond his ken, but on ‘policy’ on ‘strategy’ he is the indispensable ‘expert’.
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