Professors, Blogs, and the Iraq War

I enjoyed this back and forth between Dan Drezner and Justin Logan over the differences in prevailing opinion between IR academics and the Washington foreign policy community during the lead up to the Iraq War. Justin's contention is that the foreign policy community was (and still is) way more hawkish than their IR counterparts, and this was due to the perceived negative career implications of being a foreign policy dove at that time in Washington.

I was thinking about this when I read Ezra Klein's recent piece on the "Revenge of the sources". Ezra is responding the Nate Thayer-Atlantic incident and his contention is that the people turning out copy on the internet and not getting paid are primarily the same who used to be unpaid sources for journalists:

That, at least, was the situation until the Internet made the supply of “newsprint” virtually infinite. Now, the people who were once sources can write their own blogs, or they send op-ed submissions or even feature articles to editors looking for vastly more content. Think about Brad DeLong’s blog, Marginal Revolution, or the Monkey Cage. This work often doesn’t pay — at least not at first — but it offers a much more reliable, predictable and controllable form of exposure. It’s a direct relationship with an audience rather than one mediated by a professional journalist.

I think this is right. But I think the implications go beyond the structure of labor in journalism. Academics are now able to play a larger public role in policy discussion. Ten years ago a guy like Scott Sumner could have maybe gotten an op-ed published in a minor newspaper. Now it's probably fair to say he has had some influence on Federal Reserve policy-making. Similarly, everybody and their grandma knows who Nate Silver is, and I think he has changed the way a lot of people think about pundits and election forecasting.

If Logan is right and IR academics are more "realist" in orientation and less hawkish in general, than its interesting to think about how the debate over the Iraq war would have played out in the media environment of today. It is easy to imagine more IR academics playing a larger role in our public discussions. Looking back at some of the commentary in the run up to the Iraq war, it is hard to ignore how "political" its orientation is, and how nonacademic the arguments being made are. There was very little realistic assesment of how the war would turn out, or what the costs and benefits would be. I'd like to think that the widespread existence and mainstream recognition of blogs would have lead to a more healthy, intelligent, and balanced policy discussion. Matthew Yglesias said that one of the reasons he initially supported the war was the feeling that you had to be a supporter in order to be taken seriously in the media environment of the time. If someone like Stephen Walt had been regularly blogging at the time, maybe things would have been different.