Talk:Leo Strauss
Shadia Drury is amazing at misinformation. If Drury had only read "Thoughts on Machiavelli..." Drury would know that Strauss is adamantly opposed to Machiavellianism. But no one wants to read anymore, which is what Professor Strauss was pointing out and trying to correct.
Relocating the following paragraphs here until sourcing can be found for it:
- A more limited argument analogous to that of Robert Lucas regarding economics, is that any theory of leaders' behavior, like market behavior, had to assume that the enemy was as sophisticated and capable of self-assessments as any American, as capable of lying, and that it was "naïve" to assume that any question short of "what would we do?" and "why would he tell us that?" could lead to accurate anticipation. They suggested that political philosophy, with its emphasis on the variety of regimes, could provide an "antidote" to the C.I.A.'s failings, and would help in understanding Islamic leaders, "whose intellectual world was so different from our own." How the Western academic view of other cultures would assist in evaluating the Western intelligence agency view, retaining Western bias and losing direct experience in the field, was not addressed by Shulsky and Schmitt. They focused elsewhere:"
- "This does appear to be the attitude of Paul Wolfowitz, whose admission that the claim that weapons of mass destruction were in Iraq was advanced to the UN "for bureaucratic reasons within the US government" was in part responsible for extreme pressure coming to bear on Tony Blair, who in Wolfowitz's view would simply have been a dupe, as one who sincerely believed in this claim. And, unlike Bush, justified it explicitly to a House that had not only the power but the obligation to refuse if they thought it unwise. See the feature article on weapons of mass deception."
Artificial Intelligence 09:00, 4 Feb 2006 (EST)
Various errors & editorializing removed
This is a particularly poor piece of work, largely a rehash of Seymour Hersh's New Yorker piece, to which a large number of citations have been appended to make it look legitimate, but with not the slightest evidence that the compiler has the slightest acquaintance with their content. I took out some basic errors (e.g. the statement that Paul Wolfowitz did his dissertation under Strauss; his actual advisor was Wohlstetter) and a number of unsourced bits of editorializing about the supposed nature of democracies et sim. What remains is still a kind of unbalanced hatchet job by someone with an animus against Strauss, yet with no particular expertise on the topic. Someone (not me) really needs to redo this from scratch.
