August 21, 2005
Another bad argument
Eric posted the other day about two bad arguments used by the left, the Chickenhawk label and the thought that “Moral Authority” trumps everything else. I spotted another one yesterday. I was watching C-SPAN2’s BookTV, and they had Helen Caldicott, a left-wing physician and author whose political position can be summed up as “killing is bad”. She would definitely be considered a strident pacifist, believing that all war is wrong. Needless to say, she’s highly against the Iraq war.
It was a call-in show, and she got a question about how military force stopped Hitler, it was military force that stopped Bosnian ethnic cleansing, military force stopped Saddam from killing hundreds of thousands more of his own citizens. Her response was one I’ve heard from the left (including Matt and DJ) many times. She immediately launched into a tirade about how Saddam was a CIA man, about how we built him into what he is today by supporting him in the Iraq/Iran war, and how it was all our fault that Saddam was who he was. Thus, it must necessarily follow that we shouldn’t go to war to remove Saddam.
One question: how does one follow from the other?
The debate over America’s foreign policy, specifically with respect to how we handle less-than-savory characters when our interests align with theirs (as in the Iran/Iraq war, or supporting the mujahadeen against the Soviets), is a debate we need to have. We’ve seen from Saddam and Osama that these people may get too big for their britches and start becoming belligerents. It should force us to reconsider exactly how we interact with these sorts of people. We may be running into the same sort of problems with the Saudis and Pakistan, so we must determine the possible future liabilities of this strategy.
But that has no bearing on whether or not we needed to fight the Taliban or Iraq. Sure, we can say we made a mistake in supporting Saddam and Iraq back in the 80’s. Does that make Saddams behavior, invading Kuwait, massacring his own people, threatening his neighbors in the region, and generally being a nasty dictator, any less bad? Does that make Saddam any less of a threat to us or the world?
You can make the anti-war case based on the merits that Saddam wasn’t a threat to us, and that he wouldn’t work with terrorists to attack the US. We may not agree on that case, but it’s certainly a valid topic for debate. But trying to claim that we shouldn’t fight Saddam now because we helped him in the past is just plain silly.
As an example, let’s say you crash your car into a tree. To make it a little more sinister, let’s say you had a few drinks that night, and that was the cause. You did something wrong and stupid. You deserved to crash your car up, it is almost expected considering what you did. So do you leave your car all crashed up, or do you fix it? Obviously you fix it. It was a mistake, but even if you’re the cause of that mistake, that doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be fixed.
How about the tax system? We’ve created a monstrous, counter-productive, wasteful tax code. It’s something that absolutely needs to be reformed, and any reform will step on someones toes. Any reform will have some winners and losers. Does that mean that we should be forced into keeping our current system? Of course not! If there is a better way, we need to look at implementing it, even though we screwed it up ourselves and some people would be negatively impacted by the change. After all, if we can show that many more people are negatively impacted by our current system than the proposed system, it might be worth it, right?
According to wikipedia, the logical fallacy at work here is the irrelevant conclusion. Their example is “There is a lot of violence in America’s inner-cities. You should therefore support an increase to welfare funding.” One statement does not follow from the other. If you think America has done wrong by supporting tin-pot dictators, the logical conclusion is that America shouldn’t support tin-pot dictators. The conclusion that we should not then remove them from power is they are belligerent is completely irrelevant. They are two separate debates.
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The reason we anti-war lefties bring up how we built Saddam’s army is that it shows what obvious bullshit the “humanitarian case for war” really is. To hear Rumsfeld talk about Saddam’s human rights violations when he was literally a guest in Saddam’s Presidential Palace on the day the world found out about the shelling of the Kurds strikes me as almost criminally disingenuous.
If there was one iota of rhetoric where we took some sort of responsibility for Saddam’s war machine, I might have felt differently about how the war was sold. But nary a mention in the Administration’s speeches about how we propped up Saddam, so now it is our responsibility to help the Iraqi people.
It shows how little we (or anyone else) actually care about Iraqi citizens. Their suffering is just a convenient point to bring up to mobilize the war machine, because we obviously don’t really care.
Personally, I liked the no-fly zone. I thought that was a working policy, and it established a semi-autonomous Kurdistan.
We were shot at in the no-fly zone. How often do you have to be shot at before you are allowed to take out the guy ordering the shooting?
Also, we didn’t support Saddam BECAUSE he was brutal. We supported him b/c he was Iran’s enemey, and they had just kidnapped our people for over a year. It doesn’t follow that we don’t care about the Iraqi people.
You may love your wife and best friend, but if they sleep with each other, you are permitted to change your policy as to one or both of them.
The Left’s argument here is and always has been irrelevant.
You may love your wife and best friend, but if they sleep with each other, you are permitted to change your policy as to one or both of them.
AHAHAHAHAHAAHAHAHA!!!
That’s freaking funny.
To make it truly topical, of course, you need to modify it slightly.
You may have a best friend who is having an affair with some unknown guy’s wife. And he’s still your friend, regardless of that fact. But once he starts sleeping with your wife, then there are problems.
Hmmm… can we unpack the statement, “Also, we didn’t support Saddam BECAUSE he was brutal. We supported him b/c he was Iran’s enemy” for moment?
Saddam came to power because he was literally the most brutal man in Iraq’s military regime. When he signed the Treaty of Algiers with Iran in 1975, both sides agreed to withdraw support for Islamist militants and Kurdish separatist elements in each other’s countries in order to fix the border. When the Islamic Revolution of 1979 happened, the new government declared that it did not intend to honor the Treaty of Algiers, which is basically how the war started. They did this because they knew Saddam had expelled Khomeini from Najaf as part of the treaty with the Shah, and they also figured that they could defeat him in a war, so why not provoke him with border raids, etc.?
So, in a certain sense, we did in fact support him because he was brutal, and it was this same brutality which made him Iran’s enemy, not to mention our support of the Shah which earned us the enimity of the democratizing revolutionaries (see my comments about Iran elsewhere on this blog).
Now, instead of ‘brutal,’ you could have used a specific example and said, “We didn’t support Saddam because he committed [insert atrocity here].”
But then, the really awful things he did, the mass executions, the use of weapons of mass destruction, and so forth, didn’t really start until he got our support and weapons. Ask Rumsfeld where he was on the day the world found out about the gassing of the Kurds.