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The Imaginarium of Dr. O’Bagy

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In a way, it’s a shame that U.S. intervention in Syria may be avoided just as the cast is filling out.

Playing the administration that heralds the threat of foreign WMD attacks in some far-off Middle Eastern land, we have the Obama administration. As the cantankerous grizzled war senator for whom no planned intervention is meaty enough, we have Arizona’s official old man John McCain. CNN’s Wolf Blitzer is back again playing Wolf Blitzer on cable news. And, finally playing the fraudulent-though-widely-cited scholar who has been repeatedly unleashed by neocon think tanks and questionable foreign opposition groups, we have the recently disgraced Syrian “expert”: fake Dr. Elizabeth O’Bagy. She’s had an interesting run, we all had a laugh, and now she’s lost a job. That she even got a cameo in this geopolitical drama is terrifying.

The Institute for the Study of War — a hawkish “think tank,” whose “studies” typically arrive at the answer “yes, please” — relieved O’Bagy from her duties as a senior analyst this week after discovering, they claim, that O’Bagy lied about completing her doctoral dissertation.

“The Institute for the Study of War,” it announced in a statement, “has learned and confirmed that, contrary to her representations, Ms. Elizabeth O’Bagy does not in fact have a PhD degree from Georgetown University. ISW has accordingly terminated Ms. O’Bagy’s employment, effective immediately.”

A strange story that raises some questions about what ISW knew and when it knew it, to be sure. A study O’Bagy authored in March of this year described her, accurately, as a member of a joint masters/PhD program working on her dissertation. ISW director Kim Kagan claims that O’Bagy told her in May that she’d successfully defended her dissertation, which she had not. And still has not.

O’Bagy clearly liked the ring of “Dr. Elizabeth O’Bagy,” is the thing. “You can call me doctor, if you want,” she told the Daily Caller in a recent interview. And no objections were raised after McCain cited, at length in a hearing, her now-infamous Wall Street Journal op-ed from late August, wherein she argues that claims about the Syrian rebels being bloodthirsty terrorists had been wildly overstated. All the while, he referred to her as “Dr. Elizabeth O’Bagy.”

And who wouldn’t like all this lavish deference? It wasn’t that long ago that O’Bagy was just an unpaid intern at the ISW. It was in 2012 that she became something much more, as Politico reports, “when a researcher needed a fluent Arabic speaker, which transformed her internship into a much longer gig.” Thus she became a senior analyst on Syria.

Those who shill for war are notably generous with providing networking access to their sympathizers, which allowed O’Bagy to rake in another gig: an advisor for the Syrian Emergency Task Force. The Wall Street Journal got in a bit of trouble for not mentioning this at all when it ran her op-ed in late August. Eventually the paper added a “clarification” that noted, “in addition to her role at the Institute for the Study of War, Ms. O’Bagy is affiliated with the Syrian Emergency Task Force, a nonprofit operating as a 501(c)(3) pending IRS approval that subcontracts with the U.S. and British governments to provide aid to the Syrian opposition.” Ugh, those sticklers, always demanding that someone who works with a lobby that demands military intervention in Syria disclose this fact in a widely-cited op-ed about how grand it would be to intervene in Syria. It’s not like she did anything that important for the group, except . . . organize McCain’s photo-op in the country this year.

We can spend forever debating how much difference there is between a PhD candidate waiting to defend her dissertation and a PhD who’s successfully defended her dissertation. We can spend just as long arguing over when she lied, to which supervisor, and the severity of the lie. But there is a larger issue at the root of this fiasco: Why was anyone, let alone Johns McCain and Kerry, paying so much attention to an untested and unknown twenty-six-year-old? The Syrian civil war is notable, because so few journalists and outside experts have been able to get into the country or to gain access to any reliable evidence whatever. So, how is it that the work of a inexperienced, Washington-based pseudoacademic had become the chief source of evidence that the United States of America used to take military action in Syria?

One of the few working journalists in Syria sums it up neatly:

And while Kerry spoke before Congress about O’Bagy’s “enormous” experience covering Syria, Janine Di Giovanni, a veteran foreign correspondent who has reported on the ground there, suggested that the young researcher had “exaggerated wildly her experience inside Syria.”

Di Giovanni told HuffPost that she’s sure O’Bagy has read on Syrian history and the Assad family and that she’s had some on-the-ground experience, “but not what she led Kerry and others to believe.”

“Those of us who work in Syria, as reporters or researchers, are a very small group of people,” di Giovanni said. “We’re all incredibly cautious. We’re all protective of each other. It’s a very difficult job and difficult war to work in. It’s not a war to cut your teeth in. A lot of people were quite shocked when a 26-year-old Ph.D, so-called Syria expert who appeared to have never worked in the region, and whom no one had heard of, appeared on CNN and other networks as a Syrian expert.”

Keep that in mind, ambitious PhD candidates: it is all about knowing the right people and speaking Arabic.