Please excuse me for getting to this late; I’ve been on the road for nearly a month and only had the opportunity to pick up Rajiv’s book yesterday. Many people both here and at Powerline have demonstrated Rajiv’s sloppiness and/or dishonesty. Perhaps that’s par for the course. Rajiv’s book is not history. What is disappointing is that it pretends to be. In Yale’s history department, we used to have a 25-year-rule. It was a good one, and is one of the reasons why I haven’t written a book on Iraq, despite a number of queries and contract offers. It was simply impossible to do justice to a topic unless one had access to the whole range of sources. Interviews and biographies, and a few leaked documents are not enough. Next to plagiarism, perhaps the greatest scholarly sin (although a common one in universities in these politicized days) is omission and cherry-picking of data.

What disappoints me is Rajiv’s substitution of anecdotes for hard data and numbers. Not testing hypotheses is lazy and should be below the standards of The Washington Post. It’s all well and good to push the theory that the CPA was reserved for political appointees. But beyond anecdotes of individuals here and there, do the facts support this? Of the first 18 members of the governance team deployed, one junior member (I think he was a GS-9) was a Defense Department appointee and the rest were from the State Department, most of whom were career foreign service officers. Ryan Crocker, a very talented Arabist now serving as Ambassador to Pakistan, handpicked the team; he actively excluded non-DoD people. Likewise, if Rajiv took a look at Bremer’s head office—his inner circle—he might find that most were career ambassadors, including many who were Clinton appointees.

Another oft-cited example is Tom Warrick, the emcee of the Future of Iraq program, who was allegedly prevented from deployment for political reasons. Not quite true. It is never acceptable to threaten Iraqis or claim that your rolodex is the future Iraqi government.

It may also be trendy to treat de-Baathification as a huge mistake. But, again, if anyone looks at the numbers, violence is proportional to re-Baathification.

So why did Rajiv do this? Who knows. Perhaps he’s sloppy. He wouldn’t be the first. George Packer’s book was well-received, but deeply flawed. Both had a narrow range of sources whose stories they did not check. Both filled in the blanks with theories spun by bloggers. Perhaps Rajiv had an agenda. I don’t know. More likely, he’s just young and ambitious. Ambition shouldn’t trump integrity. Nor should the ability to write fluid prose substitute for the substance beyond it. In these partisan times, hatchet-jobs are more lucrative than research. He’ll have his glory and make his money but, in the long-term, it’s hard to put a price on honesty.