The Faulty Logic of War (Leftist Barf Alert)

I don't like being stampeded into war, and that's what it seems like's happening now. In the past month Iraq has somehow gotten a whole lot more dangerous than it was before. I've been waiting for the administration to tell us exactly what that new danger was, but have been fed a bunch of illogical and inconsistent arguments instead.

This argument, for example: 1. Al-Qaeda is a terrorist organization. 2. Saddam Hussein supports terrorist organizations. Therefore, Saddam supports al-Qaeda. My professor would have thrown me out of Logic 101 if I'd tried to peddle that argument there. The argument conflates all terrorist organizations into one, when there are huge differences between them. The CIA and even Condolleeza Rice have admitted that Saddam Hussein was probably not aware of or involved in 9/11.

Another version of the same illogical argument is that since we are at war with terror organizations and Saddam Hussein supports terror organizations, we should therefore be a war with Saddam. Again, there's no logical reason to single-out Iraq or Saddam Hussein for action here. One could make the same argument against declared enemies like Iran and North Korea, and declared allies like Syria, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Indonesia, and a dozen other nations, all of whom support "terrorist organizations" of some kind. (The problem being that one nation's "terrorist" is often another nation's "freedom fighter.")

Another argument, more sound bite than argument, is Condoleezza Rice's statement last weekend in response to those asking for proof, "We don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud." Logically this statement couldn't beat its way out of a paper bag --- it assumes (nuclear risk) what it sets out to prove.

Dr. Rice's statement is based on report by a London think tank that suggests that Iraq could put together a nuclear bomb in six months --- if it had the fissionable plutonium available to do it. That's a huge if when you consider that Israel destroyed Iraq's capability to produce plutonium over a decade ago, and bigger when you consider that plutonium remains the most tightly regulated substance in the world. The fact is that Iraq has had this capability for a long time, but expertise is useless without the plutonium to make it happen.

Another consideration is the breakneck speed at which the Bush administration has been moving since early September. President Bush has called for the UN to support military action immediately and Congress to give him immediate authority to take action. Yet where was this concern for speed a month earlier, when Mr. Bush spent the time on vacation at Crawford, except for a few side trips to raise money for Congressional campaigns. What's changed in the last month, besides his falling job approval numbers?

Finally, the most suspect argument of all: If Saddam obtains nuclear weapons, he will use them. That argument is based on Saddam's use of poison gas on rebelling Iraqi Kurds in 1988. However, Saddam had many opportunities to use poison gas and biological agents on the Coalition forces and Israel during the Gulf War and did not do so. UN arms inspectors later found warheads capable of delivering these weapons that could have been used by Iraq --- but weren't.

Everything about Saddam Hussein points to a man who wants to increase his personal power and influence. Saddam's principal cause is Saddam, not suicide. When he used gas on the Kurds in 1988, it was with impunity, knowing there was no one who would retaliate against him. When he failed to use it on Coalition forces and Israel two years later, it was because he knew he had no impunity. Saddam wants a nuclear bomb for the power and prestige it grants, not as a ride to death and glory like Slim Pickens in Dr. Strangelove.

From the left we hear voices denouncing the United States as culpable in
the oppression of the Saudi and Iraqi people, and thus it would be unjust,
from the liberal perspective, to visit the horrors of war upon people
when it is America itself which is responsible for the bitter impoverishment
of middle eastern peoples because the violence visited upon us is a direct
consequence of American oppression of these foreign peoples.

From bill clinton, tom dashle, hordes of college proffessors, the message
from the left is clear, we can not do anything about rogue nations and
terror because they are the bitter fruits of our own misguided politics.

An outstanding example of the intellectual work product of an absolutely
pure moron, idiocy distilled, so pure it can actually corrode human gray matter
on contanct.

I would ask those who entertain this absurd excuse for "thought" whether America
owes the Saudi people a debt of gratitude for having, together with all of the
oppressed peoples of the world, created our democratic institutions which avail
the American people the greatest measure of individual freedom ever afforded any
population in world history. Certainly if one is determined to imagine into
existence American blame for dysfunctional foreign domestic politics, one must
similarly endorse oppressed foreigners as the cause of our prosperity, for surely
American prosperity arises not from our cherished liberties, no, it must come
from the oppression of foreign lands.

Perhaps we could dispense with this entire diseased fabric and recognize that
the Saudi people, and the American people, and every other population of every
nation throughout history, get the government that they deserve. If Saudis are
oppressed, they have not successfully resisted oppression. The fact that America
recognizes the right of Saudi and Iraqi civilians to languish in oppression
is simply the consequence of recognition of the sovereignty of all nations,
including our own. One can not force any person to be free at the point of
a gun.

The perspective which finds America culpable in the oppression of foreign
peoples by their own governments is a perspective which is absolutely determined
to identify every injustice as the consequence of an excess of individual liberty
which us uniquely reserved for the American People by the United States
Constitution. To some, freedom and individual liberty are an outrageous affront
to the superiority of their State of Enlightenment, the liberty of the "collective
entity" is paramount compared to individual human rights, and the guidance of an
enlightened ruling class is required to raise the conciousness of the Great Unwashed.
This self aggrandizing hypocrisy, one can easily imagine, should be very familiar
territory to saddam hussein, as he imagines himself as a being of such vastly
superior vision as to be able to better run the lives of his people than they
can themselves. Liberal distain for liberty creates instructive parallels.

Liberal political theory was so resoundingly repudiated, in such detail, in the 20th
century, at the cost of hundreds of millions of human lives, untold treasure,
and hundreds of millions of human lives more squandered in varying degrees of
collectivist enslavement, that the bitter dregs of collectivism now thrive only
in the rarified artificial atmosphere of academe and other bastions of liberalism,
preserved in the intellectual formaldehyde of tenure, paranoid exclusionary
bias, and the self aggrandizing hubris of elitists.

Today we have on the world stage an authentic madman, a brutal tyrant and oppressor,
who takes time off from pouring gasoline down the throats of his political
opposition and turning them into human torches to threaten the political and
economic stability of our planet, and millions of innocent lives in the middle east,
with nuclear, chemical, and biological filth which sadddam relentlessly pursues
as engines of industrial human slaughter. Only the bitter minds dedicated to the
obsolete leftist formulations rotting on the dungheap of history could transform
the imperitive to protect the American and the world communities into a reason to
lie down and watch while saddam does as he wishes with weapons of mass murder.

Hey, who are we to take down saddam? saddam is our fault, we therefore must allow
him to do anything he wishes, at any cost in human life and political and economic
disaster which may follow. Just sit down, America, and watch the show.

The only thing more outrageous than academic pinheads running interference for our
latter day Iraqi hitler is that these diseased formulations of opinion have any
currency whatsoever in the public discussion of the proper role of the lone
remaining superpower on the planet in addressing an outlaw regime threatening
countless lives.

There is no clear winner in the coming conflict, saddam may already have enough
weapons stockpiled to turn the middle east into a toxic wasteland. What is clear
is that saddam has used well a decade of dereliction of duty in enforcing the terms
of surrender in the Gulf War. The world is a far more dangerous place because the
USA has allowed saddam hussein a free hand in developing weapons which will soon
hold the entire middle East hostage if good people continue to do nothing.

More dereliction, more complacency, more negligence of the grave and growing threat
of a madman in control of the middle east, will have the predictable outcome of
an unprecedented human trajedy. Even the playboy-in-chief and his vapid
senatorial sidekick, tom dashle, sponsored, passed, and signed into law a senate
resolution which stipulates that it is not a matter of if, but when,
saddam will utilize his horde of filth to destroy the lives of countless innocent
civilians, and that the American People must be ready for the call when time to
confront saddam hussein comes.

Perhaps even the liberal dinosaurs on academic life support could trouble themselves
to uncritically consume the clinton party line just one more time, get the hell out
of the way, and allow the Commander in Chief to confront the perils of striving to
make the world a safer place. The fact that both clinton and daschle are
hypocrites, speaking out today urgently in contradiction to their own voices,
simply affords an opportunity to engage either of the two faces they present us
in the Iraq debate. Listen to the face urging courage and resolve in confronting
virulent and growing evil, saddam hussein is an insane, dedicated megalomaniac,
continuing to steer a cowardly course denying the growing threat is a recipe
for disaster on a historic scale.

Nobody wants war, it is the last resort, not the first. Rarely, however, is the
decision so clearly made, technically a state of war already exists as saddam has
violated each of the nineteen UN resolutions made in the aftermath of the Gulf War.
Simply choosing not to blind oneself to objective reality shouldn't be too hard,
even for the dedicated ideologue. The object of the debate is not denial of a
grave reality, but rather, the object is to choose the path which will result
in the smallest possible amount of human suffering, to achieve a just peace at
the lowest possible human cost. The price of cowardice, we learned in two global
wars, is far higher than the cost in human terms of proactively engaging threats
to humanity. The spectacle of Kofi Annan waving a piece of paper about heralding
"peace in our time" evokes the image of Neville Chamberlain facilitating the
rise of the last maniac to plunge the world into darkness only a generation ago.

Those who choose to voice opposition to confronting saddam hussein should do so
with arguments which have at least the faintest image, the most humble shred of
an argument based upon fact. Offering alternatives to making war is a service
to all of humanity. Alternatives, however, do not include forming a de facto
partnership with mass murderers by refusing to countenance the existence of a
threat. One would think that the annihilation of vast populations would be
preferable to even considering placing the US military at any risk whatsoever.
Or perhaps the loss of human life is of small importance to some when compared
to the urgency of rescuing liberalism from the judgement of history. A little
denial, after all, goes a very long way.

Hey, maybe President Bush will fall victim to unforseeable untoward consequences.
There is a hope that our quaint, alternative liberal elites can cling to, since
the case for preventing nuclear, chemical, and biological hell consuming American,
European, and middle eastern lives clearly provokes no interest in equal measure
to their fears of political disaster they perceive in a Bush victory in confronting
saddam. Or maybe dissenters can abandon the political axes they have so tirelessly
and fruitlessly ground for a generation and join in an enlightened debate about
the future of America and the world and the dangers which we all face in
objective reality.

We have been threatening to come to the aid of the Iraqi people for a long time.
While in a philosophical view the Iraqi people deserve to be left to the fate
they have made for themselves, as a practical matter it is wrong to allow the
political leadership of Iraq to continue literally to feed children to packs of
dogs. It is long since time to reverse the ineptitude and corruption of the
past eight years and at once prevent a regional human trajedy while rescuing a
nation held in brutal slavery.

"Saddam never gassed his own people. There is no evidence of this at all...all we keep hearing is that "Iraq gassed his own people."

No evidence at all? Aside from documentaries I've seen on this subject -- particulary the terrible atrocities committed against Halabja, Iraq in 1987 and 1988 -- there are thousands of witnesses, hundreds of photographs, and even video footage of the attacks themselves. I have seen these things, the photgraphs and video footage of the attack itself, and the horrible aftermath which torments thousands to this very day. What I have seen is far more credible than your blanket dismissal.

Here are some links, if you would like to see some articles for yourself:

New Yorker Magazine: THE GREAT TERROR

Salon: Remember Halabja

TREATMENT & RESEARCH PROGRAMS FOR WMD SURVIVORS IN IRAQI KURDISTAN

Chemical massacre of the people of Halabja by the Iraqi regime March,16, 1988

There are many, many more. Avail yourself of a Google search if you want more sources, or don't trust the ones I've provided.

"If any people were killed it was because both Iraq and Iran were using poison gas in the war against each other."

It is true that both Iraq and Iran used chemical weapons against each other on the battlefield, with horrible results. It is not true that Saddam only used his weapons agaist Iran. Halabja is just one of hundreds of attacks against Iraqi civilians. The Halabja Post-Graduate Medical Institute has documented 281 known WMD attacks in Iraqi Kurdistan. That's a lot of attacks, and difficult to conceal, even in a place like Iraq.

If you have credible evidence to the contrary, please present it.

"In fact, THE U.S. GOVERNMENT HAS CONFIRMED THAT THOSE KURDS WHO WERE KILLED WERE KILLED BY IRANIAN GAS - cyanide gas...not the mustard gas the Iraqis used."

I have been unable to substantiate your assertion that the U.S. government "confirmed that those kurds who were killed were killed by iranian gas". When was this announced, and by whom? Please point me to your sources.

From what I have read, a combination of different agents was used, including mustard gas, (possibly) cyanide gas and the nerve gases sarin, tabun and VX. Extremely high rates of birth defects and nervous system disorders in Halabja to this day are consistent with exposure to nerve agents.

Please give me some basis for understanding your claims, because your sweeping denials are much less convincing than the truth.

Imal

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