Juan Cole's Fictions

- (Weekly Standard) - 10 months, 2 weeks ago...

Poor Juan Cole. The University of Michigan professor never had a chance against the vast powers arrayed against him over the last several years. It seems the academic was the target of a conspiracy, engineered by the Bush administration, with the connivance of the intelligence community and that other pillar of the military industrial complex devoted to ensuring the hegemony of the right wing thought machine, Yale University. Cole first won notoriety sometime after the 2003 invasion of Iraq. His blog, Informed Comment, became a must read for anyone who believed that Bush was a war criminal and that Operation Iraqi Freedom was the handiwork of a neoconservative cabal in Washington whose primary loyalty was to Israel. Cole himself had never been to Iraq, and even to date has yet to set foot in a country regarding which he claims expertise.  But of course expertise is the last reason why journalists sought him out for quotations or TV producers wanted to put him on the air. It was precisely his paranoia and narrow-minded focus on a president the left loved to hate that won him the attention and admiration of the media. Cole was effectively a character actor, cast in the role of the angry professor, and it made little difference that he was clueless—and he had that University of Michigan affiliation. Most of Cole’s academic colleagues agreed with him about Iraq—they certainly hated Bush as much as he did, and they perhaps envied Cole his celebrity—but very few of them ever confused real scholarly work with blogging, as Cole did. His intellectual reputation rested on his ability to scan a few Arabic-language newspapers, interpret them, and turn around a few hundred words of anti-Bush copy once or twice a day. That might be more productive than what some scholars do, but it’s not scholarly—and this is why Cole was turned down after he applied for a job at Yale. He was not doing academic work. So let’s cut to the present. Now fading from the limelight, Cole apparently understands that he’s already a nostalgia piece, so the professor rolls out his old standby routine and starts shouting at the top of the rafters about the man he no doubt considers his arch nemesis. It seems that the only thing that kept Cole from getting that job at Yale was a 1968 Yale graduate, George W. Bush. Or at least that’s the case that Cole and his colleagues at the Middle East Studies Association are making. MESA president Suad Joseph, a professor at University of California Davis, addressed a letter to Yale president Richard C. Levin and the school’s provost, Peter Salovey, asking them to investigate the possibility that “influence or pressure from, or prejudicial information supplied by, the Bush administration may have played a role in Yale University’s decision in 2006 to reject the appointment of Professor Juan Cole to the Yale faculty.” Cole and Joseph’s utterly fantastic conjecture ...