the mystery cult of Gladwellian relativism

Since i've begun using Google Reader, i've been reading an awful lot of RSS feeds. When i was test driving the thing, i subscribed the Thinker bundle. After a couple of weeks of reading Malcolm Gladwell, i began to feel unclean. I was aware of his books The Tipping Point and Blink, but I never picked them up. My district manager had urged all of his managers to read the damned things long ago, but i steadfastly refuse to consider the babble of any of these pop psychology cults. The last straw with Gladwell was when i read his praise of Milton Friedman.

Maud Newton's dismantling of Malcolm Gladwell's defense of Enron's Jeff Skilling makes me very happy indeed. However, this paragraph of Gladwell i find especially offensive:

The problem of what would happen in Iraq after the toppling of Saddam Hussein was, by contrast, a mystery. It wasn’t a question that had a simple, factual answer. Mysteries require judgments and the assessment of uncertainty, and the hard part is not that we have too little information but that we have too much. The C.I.A. had a position on what a post-invasion Iraq would look like, and so did the Pentagon and the State Department and Colin Powell and Dick Cheney and any number of political scientists and journalists and think-tank fellows. For that matter, so did every cabdriver in Baghdad.

Gladwell is an idiot. It's one thing to be a blinkered acolyte of the free market, but quite another not to be able to admit that there was never a mystery about what would happen in Iraq. It was obvious from the very beginning that the American public was being lied to. Having a "position" and having database of facts that have been objectively assessed are two entirely different things.