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I thought the nadir of Lee Smith’s contributions at Slate was his article on multilateralism that thoroughly confused the Iraq war with interventions in international terrorism and seemed unaware that many critics had different stances on the need for multilateralism depending on which issue you’re talking about.

Only today, he attacks the academy for impeding the training of competent linguists capable of aiding government intelligence efforts. The supposed obstructionism is both ideological (”Whatever the merits of the post-colonial thesis, the message that writers and academics had better beware of abetting the ambitions of empire is not likely to make graduates eager to serve their government”) and political - academics resist micromanagement of their output by a Congressional oversight panel.

But Smith is missing the wood for the trees. Matthew Yglesias reveals his number comparisons to be bunk, and then points out a general problem with his argument:

Last but by no means least, the whole thrust of the piece — that we should be addressing the US government’s woefull incapacity to speak Arabic (and Turkish, and Pashto, and Persian, etc., etc., etc.) by worrying about the efficiency of a $90 million per year program is ridiculous. Training people to speak these languages is the sine qua non of more effective intelligence, law enforcement, and public diplomacy and would help make the military more effective. We’re talking about the marginal cost of 150 Tomahawk Cruise missiles. The annual budget of the National Endowment for the Arts is $140 million. The Iraq War costs more than this every day. We can easily spare the money — there’s no reason to get penny-wise and pound-foolish about this.

So maybe we’re not throwing all that much “good money after bad.” To turn around Smith’s phrasing, whatever the problems of the post-colonial thesis, its impact on the bigger problem of untrained linguists is marginal to the general bungled priorities of our intelligence and security budgeting.