VICTOR NAVASKY BELIEVES "the experts are always wrong."

It's frightening to imagine what could validate this assertion more than the invasion of Iraq.

Almost 25 years after the amusing "The Experts Speak: The Definitive Compendium of Authoritative Misinformation," Navasky and Christopher Cerf have compiled its successor, "Mission Accomplished!" The new book, nicely illustrated by satirist Robert Grossman, hangs authorities of all vocations and ideological stripes with their words about slam dunks, cakewalks, willing coalitions, the war's cost, Jessica Lynch, Blackwater and much more.

Navasky is publisher emeritus of The Nation and a journalism professor at Columbia. He requests that you don't consider him an expert on journalism.

» EXPRESS: How was the book compiled?
» NAVASKY: A couple of recent college graduates wanted to be researchers. We had them read all of Tom Freidman's columns. Every six months he'd write a column saying, "We'll know in six months whether or not it's gonna work." When you read 'em all at the same time, it's very funny.

» EXPRESS: And on every other page, you quote an expert who says that the next few months will tell us what's going to happen in Iraq.
» NAVASKY: You know, the thing everybody says now is, "The surge seems to be working. There has been a turning point." This idea is very familiar. In 2003, Douglas Feith said, "This month will be a political turning point." In 2004, Bush said, "A turning point will come two weeks from today." In 2005, Rumsfeld said, "The world witnessed the moment historians might one day call a turning point." ... They always talk about a turning point. Of course, if you have all those turning points, you end up going around in circles.

» EXPRESS: What's the dumbest prediction in the book?
» NAVASKY: I don't call it dumbest, but it intrigues me that the scholarly community was as consistent in its responses as the political community. Foud Ajami said that our troops will be greeted with kites and boomboxes. The other great Islamic scholar, Kanan Makiya, said our troops will be greeted with sweets and flowers.

» EXPRESS: And there's a great Grossman illustration of a boombox as an IED. Who has been the most consistently incorrect expert about Iraq?
» NAVASKY: There too many competitors. People assume, because I come from The Nation, that this is a book with a bias. But we quote John McCain and Hillary Clinton. In 2003, they had a difference of opinion as to whether the war would be settled in three or six months. Partisans of Obama say that he was right, but before the war, he had no foreign-policy experience, so he doesn't qualify as an expert. It took a non-expert to see it clearly.

» EXPRESS: You have a substantial section with figures from the administration saying essentially that "We're trying our hardest to avoid going to war," which is, of course, contradicted by the Downing Street Memo. Do you think the idea that the administration was trying to avoid going to war is the biggest lie in the book?
» NAVASKY: No. There's a lot of competition for that and it's not a question of lies. I think most of the people believed what they were saying at the time that they it. And the press is as culpable as the administration itself. They've forgotten — there were articles in The Weekly Standard and other national publications in the end of the last century, after the Soviet Union had melted down and we were the sole superpower, that said we ought to exercise our power and get rid of the bad guys around the world. And then they had the so-called Axis of Evil. So, there was this desire to go to war on the part of these fellas and it was 9/11 that made it a conceivable political option. So, they had contingency plans and they wanted to do it for a long time and the Downing Street Memo shows the hypocrisy of it, but I don't know how conscious the hypocrisy was.

It's the arrogance more than the lies that seems what we found. And when I say it's the press as well, your own columnist, Richard Cohen — who happens to be a good friend of mine — after Colin Powell's speech [at the U.N.], he wrote, "Only a fool or a Frenchman could think otherwise." That's a very funny, but very arrogant, assertion. Well, it turns out there weren't weapons of mass destruction. Richard Cohen happens to be one of those who later changed his mind about the thing.

» Politics & Prose, 5015 Connecticut Ave. NW; Fri., 7 p.m., free; 202-364-1919. (Van Ness)

Written by Express contributor Tim Follos

Posted by Express at 12:15 AM on March 28, 2008
Tagged in Books , Entertainment , The District , Top Stories , U Street-Cardozo