"... he seems quite serious about having identified an actual clinical condition ...."

(( On second thought, Mr. Bones, I think we might as well spare the Just World Peaceniks the bad news that we happen to disagree with them about their Herr Professor Doktor von Syndrome, a.k.a. "David Owen." Explaining to grown-ups why they have inadequate notions about Right and Wrong almost invariably means lots of trouble endured for very little benefit obtained. Fortunately his lordship is rather a theoretical menace to Mere Democracy rather than any clear and present danger, because he is in no position to demand credentialled expertise from the laity before graciously allowing us humble to vote. ))

It seems like an interesting move, to "medicalize" what we might otherwise regard simply as extremely bad behavior in these leaders.

It might do as a joke, or a deliberate polemical ploy when addressing one's own troops, to make out that one's political opponents are demented or "mentally ill" rather than old-fashioned knaves and fools. However, when one actually starts believing in such a propaganda, one is in a thoroughly deplorable state. It certainly looks as if Lord Owen must be a deplorable believer, for that Guardian piece mentioned in a customer comment ends with a solemn cross-reference to a longer version of the same performance in the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine. (The referent referred to does not seem to be there, however: allow me to diagnose a case of EJNC, "electronic journalism negligence complex.")

Perhaps something still worth calling Liberalism could survive clinical Owenisation, but mere democracy is obviously doomed if one really needs a white coat and a stethoscope and a portentous yimmer-yammer about syndromes to dispose of Blairs and Bushes adequately. Mere moralists need not apply, and of course lowly citizens who are not even credentialled moralists should please shut up altogether at once. (What's wrong with them? Don't they realize we all live in ExpertWorld nowadays?)

Considered as evidence of cultural and intellectual decay, Owenisation resembles the late Bruno Bettleheim's theory of how the Anglo-Saxons highjacked Freud , making the great man out all "medical" and "scientific" in a positivistic sense, instead of properly geistlich and humanistisch the way Dr. B. preferred (and claimed that Freud really is in German.) Lord Owen appears to be eminently within reach of that parallel, since Greek hybris started out much closer to temple and theatre than to the clinic. Perhaps the word did not denote precisely what we would call in English a character flaw or a moral failing, yet it was much more like that than like Tay-Sachs or AIDS or GERD.


The form of Owenisation is politically insufferable, then. Far better to ridicule the black hats honestly than set up to "diagnose" them!

The substantive matter of picking on Mr. Blair and Mr. Bush for their aggressions is entirely different, but in the Guardian piece Dr. Syndrome does repeat one common fallacy of anti-warriors that ought to be questioned a little: "Even when the insurgency developed, neither man was ready to admit error and authorise the extra troops needed." We are presumably to understand that if only Gen. Shinseki's advice had been followed and twice or three times as many troops dispatched, the outcome would have been far happier, for members of the Invasion Fan Club. Dr. Syndrome has a thesis to grind, so he implies that this was "hubristic" as well as erroneous, yet was it not in fact perfectly sensible? Busheviki and Blairites did not need more bayonets to overthrow the Ba‘th, and if they had sent more, probably the excess would have been withdrawn before the resistance/terrorism/guerilla/insurgency got properly under way. [1]




____
[1] One might make a better case for a far more general "hubrisity," one that figured largely in Secretary MacNamara's War: namely the notion that a Godzilla equipped with Superpower or even with HYPERPOWER simply can not lose to so contemptible an opposition as it encounters in Indochina or Mesopotamia.

But I don't think Lord Owen would be especially interested in syndromatizing that mistake, partly because it does not seem particularly dotty. Indeed, the political shrink may even believe in it himself.