The Harvard University political scientist Stephen M. Walt laments the fact that in the heated debates over the latest American led war and attempts at “regime change” in Libya nobody has bothered to consult what “social science” has to tell us about the probable results of such interventions. Predictably he cites zillions of empirical studies aided as he points out by ever more "sophisticated research design" to conclude that “these various scholarly studies suggest that the probability that our intervention will yield a stable democracy is low, and that our decision to intervene has increased the likelihood of civil war.” In making this claim, he neatly demonstrates the real limits of certain varieties of social science. Where one might ask, did he obtain his presumably rock solid empirical data to to claim that the real intention of this intervention is indeed to facilitate a “stable democracy” in Libya? Even while intending to be skeptical of the dominant worldview orchestrated by the official pronouncements, he falls for it, with the proverbial hook, line and sinker.
The non-debate over whether or not armed intervention will or will not magically create instant democracy continues to resurface with uncanny predictability. Such simulated debates ensure that nobody gets the "picture" by shifting attention, possibly unintentionally, to the "frame". Such steering away of any discussion of the picture to the frame, if successful, constitutes a very effective way of exercising power - an insight from the great Canadian/American sociologist Erving Goffman's Frame Analysis: The Organization of Human Experience, 1974.
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