Why doesn Consumer Reports rate analysis from public intellectuals?
By Peter McKenna In the authoritative words of one international affairs analyst in late October: “US policy has assumed that the Northern Alliance, and possible Taliban defectors or dissident tribal groups elsewhere in the country, would do the ground fighting to overturn Afghanistan’s present government, once air power had broken its resistance. This is not happening.” Barely two weeks later, that’s exactly what happened. Why was it that so many public intellectuals read the war on terrorism incorrectly? What explains their often “false prophecies” and ill-considered prognostications? Richard Posner, a US Court of Appeals judge (known most recently for his mediation in the Microsoft antitrust case), senior lecturer at the University of Chicago Law School, and prolific author, thinks he knows precisely why. In “Public Intellectuals: A Study in Decline,” Posner turns his poison pen on scores of public intellectuals, including the likes of Noam Chomsky, Edward Luttwak, and Paul Ehrlich,
