« Freedom & Federalism | Home | AZ College Republicans want answers from Dem Congressman »
What do you think?…
By sage of monticello | August 6, 2007
A post from the blog Vox Nova and prompted after viewing the Blumenthal Chicken Hawk video:
Iraq war supporters seems to have latched onto one final mantra: if the United States did not fight [name your enemy] in Iraq, they would be be forced to fight them in the United States.
Let’s think about this for a minute. Put aside the fact that it is a ludicrous argument. Assume for a moment that it is true. What does that tell you? It tells you that the war brigade is perfectly happy to pick some distant far away country, wreak total havoc and allow it to descend into chaos, simply so the bad guys do not knock on their own doors. This is consequentialism at its worst. This is evil.
Republicans being called evil. Nothing new there. Besides, that is not what I wanted to you comment on. Instead I wanted some feedback on the bolded section. It caught me off guard for a second.
This may seem silly, but I think talking out and debunking some of the opposition’s arguments concerning Iraq might go a long way in solving what Justin Jordan in a comment on the orginal Blumenthal post rightly pointed out as our incompetence in debating the Iraq War issue.
Being informed, in my opinion, takes a debate and I would be more than happy to make this site a venue for such a debate.
So, I’ll start. My first reaction to the argument above is that it is a straw man fallacy, at least in the way I understand straw man fallacies. The argument builds up our side in a way that makes it easy to tear down. It does this by making the argument to invade Iraq seem totally random, without purpose, and completely devoid of any logic; and hence easy to tear down.
It delineates our logic in this way. First, we decide a good offense is the best defense, so we decide to fight the terrorists on their homefront instead of our own. And second, we then throw a dart at a map of the world and go and fight in the country that corresponds with where the dart stuck into the map. We then procede to cause much pointless death, destruction and chaos in a country that is entirely unrelated to our goal of preventing another terrorist attack on American soil.
That is not what Iraq is about and it is intellectually dihonest to portray it that way. But, what do you think?
Topics: Iraq, Republicans, political dialogue |
