Looks like I hit a nerve with Juan Cole.

I think it is time to be frank about some things. Jonah Goldberg knows absolutely nothing about Iraq. I wonder if he has even ever read a single book on Iraq, much less written one. He knows no Arabic. He has never lived in an Arab country. He can’t read Iraqi newspapers or those of Iraq’s neighbors. He knows nothing whatsoever about Shiite Islam, the branch of the religion to which a majority of Iraqis adheres. Why should we pretend that Jonah Goldberg’s opinion on the significance and nature of the elections in Iraq last Sunday matters? It does not. ….

And…

If Jonah Goldberg had asserted that he could fly to Mars in his pyjamas and come back in a single day, it would not have been a more fantastic allegation than the one he made about Iraq being a danger to the United States because of the nuclear issue. He made that allegation over and over again to millions of viewers on national television programs, to viewers who trusted his judgment because CNN and others purveyed him to them.

There’s more, of course. I’m a practitioner of “monstrous warmongering,” for example. But the gist seems to be Prof Cole knows more about the Middle East than I do. And he goes to great — and at times hysterical — lengths taking my opinion seriously in an effort to show that you shouldn’t. I’ll come back to some of this stuff later, but I should say that I don’t think I made the allegation that Saddam had nuclear weapons “over and over again” on CNN or anywhere else. My point was actually the reverse. Iraq didn’t have nuclear weapons and therefore we could remove Saddam at comparatively low risk — an option we didn’t, and don’t, have with North Korea. Also, I wrote columns more than once criticizing the effort to boil the whole thing down to the WMDs issue.

As for the fact that Professor Cole reads Arabic, has lived in Arab lands and all that, Bully for Him. I do love this academic retreat into expertise. Don’t get me wrong I believe in expertise and the value of books. But I wonder, does Professor Cole ever complain that Noam Chomsky, Michael Moore or Ted Kennedy don’t read arabic? Or does he bust out the “Whose is bigger” academese only when he encounters people who disagree with, or don’t suck up to, the good doctor? Absolutely, Professor Cole knows more about the Middle East than I do. That doesn’t make him right about everything having to do with the Middle East. If it did, folks like Bernard Lewis wouldn’t disagree with him. Indeed, during the Cold War how many Sovietologists got everything wrong? Answer: Lots. I’m no expert on Doc Cole nor on the Middle East, but I get the distinct impression that he’s a contender to be the Jerry Hough of Middle East experts. My point is that he may be an expert, but he’s not one I rely on. This seems to enrage Cole for reasons that say more about him than me.

As for the only substantive rebuttal he offers to my column (you need to claw through the whining and insults to find it), he makes a pretty good case for the democratic nature of the 1997 Iranian elections (though it smells of whitewash to me. I’ll consult some experts.). Of course, he now concedes that the candidates were selected by the Mullahs on ideological grounds and that others were excluded — a point he did not make when he originally praised the Iranian elections as “more democratic” than Iraq’s. The reason he didn’t make it was because it was inconvenient to his ideological — not scholarly — agenda. Indeed, as Reihan at the American Scene has noted, Cole’s larger point was to dismiss the Iraqi elections as somehow particularly undemocratic when the system used in Iraq is hardly unique. Did Cole consider the South African elections in 1994 undemocratic? How about elections in other countries which use proportional representation? It is a curious instinct which causes such a scholar to burnish the democratic credentials of a theocracy like Iran’s in order to discredit an election like we saw in Iraq last Sunday. It is an even more curious tactic when the good professor clearly understands that the nature of Iraq’s election wasn’t nearly so undemocratic as he initially insinuated.

Which brings me to his opener. He says that now is the “time to be frank about some things.” To which all I can say is, it’s about time.