The Blogosphere Sure Moves Fast

I take the evening and morning off reading blogs to catch up on my video game playing (you'll be pleased to know that my mighty Celtic CivIII empire enjoys a level of hegemony unprecedented in our world, and that, as we speak, a tank column that dwarfs the Soviet and Nazi armies at Kursk is bearing down on Rome). I figure, Friday night and Saturday - nothing much usually happens. I won't have but a few posts to catch up on. Then, before I know it, a steel cage match breaks out between Juan Cole and Jonah Goldberg over whether people lacking formal expertise on the Middle East (as Goldberg indeed lacks) can comment meaningfully on the region, and specifically on Iraq. I hope so, because a) I myself speak no Arabic (though I do have a pocket dictionary of Egyptian-dialect Arabic on my bookshelf) and have only taken a few undergraduate classes on the subject, b) most of the Arabists and Middle East experts I've known have had a remarkably homogeneous set of perspectives, making for a wildly circumscribed debate, c) most of those opinions have seemed ridiculous to me, and d) as Goldberg points out, the Arabists' immediate predecessors were the Sovietologists, who - pretty much except for Robert Conquest - had an amazingly bad track record, despite their academic credentials. (It's almost enough to make one question the worth of American higher education. But I'd never do that!)

No new substantial addition to the debate in this post. Just wanted to direct my readers to the fight, and to point out that in this Feiler-Faster universe, there's no such thing as a slow day.