Category Archives: Jonah Goldberg

Conquering opinions

In reference to a post last week about academic experts and the war (and pro-war liberal apologetics), I came across the following document (thanks samefacts):

>Advertisement in the New York Times
>Op-ed page
>9/25/02

>WAR WITH IRAQ IS NOT IN AMERICA’S NATIONAL INTEREST

>As scholars of international security affairs, we recognize that war is sometimes necessary to ensure our national security or other vital interests. We also recognize that Saddam Hussein is a tyrant and that Iraq has defied a number of U.N. resolutions.

>But military force should be used only when it advances U.S. national interests. War with Iraq does not meet this standard:

>Saddam Hussein is a murderous despot, but no one has provided credible evidence that Iraq is cooperating with al Qaeda.

>Even if Saddam Hussein acquired nuclear weapons, he could not use them without suffering massive U.S. or Israeli retaliation.

>The first Bush Administration did not try to conquer Iraq in 1991 because it understood that doing so could spread instability in the Middle East, threatening U.S. interests. This remains a valid concern today.

>The United States would win a war against Iraq, but Iraq has military options–chemical and biological weapons, urban combat–that might impose significant costs on the invading forces and neighboring states.

>Even if we win easily, we have no plausible exit strategy. Iraq is a deeply divided society that the United States would have to occupy and police for many years to create a viable state.

>Al Qaeda poses a greater threat to the U.S. than does Iraq. War with Iraq will jeopardize the campaign against al Qaeda by diverting resources and attention from that campaign and by increasing anti-Americanism around the globe. The United States should maintain vigilant containment of Iraq – using its own assets and the resources of the United Nations – and be prepared to invade Iraq if it threatens to attack America or its allies. That is not the case today. We should concentrate instead on defeating al Qaeda.

>Roobert J. Art, Brandeis University
>Richard K. Betts, Columbia University
>Dale C. Copeland, University of Virginia
>Michael C. Desch, University of Kentucky
>Sumit Ganguly, University of Texas
>Charles L. Glaser, University of Chicago
>Alexander L. George, Stanford University
>Richard K. Herrmann, Ohio State University
>George C. Herring, University of Kentucky
>Robert Jervis, Columbia University
>Chaim Kaufmann, Lehigh University
>Carl Kaysen, MIT
>Elizabeth Kier, University of Washington
>Deborah Larson, UCLA
>Jack S. Levy, Rutgers University
>Peter Liberman, Queens College
>John J. Mearsheimer, University of Chicago
>Steven E. Miller, Harvard University
>Charles C. Moskos, Northwestern University
>Robert A. Pape, University of Chicago
>Barry R. Posen, MIT
>Robert Powell, UC – Berkeley
>George H. Quester, University of Maryland
>Richard Rosecrance, UCLA
>Thomas C. Schelling, University of Maryland
>Randall L. Schweller, Ohio State University
>Glenn H. Snyder, University of North Carolina
>Jack L. Snyder, Columbia University
>Shibley Telhami, University of Maryland
>Stephen Van Evera, MIT
>Stephen M. Walt, Harvard University
>Kenneth N. Waltz, Columbia University
>Cindy Williams, MIT

In light of all of that heft and expertise–not to mention the argument in the advertisement–I wonder about things like this:

>I must confess that one of the things that made me reluctant to conclude that the Iraq war was a mistake was my general distaste for the shabbiness of the arguments on the antiwar side.

That’s Jonah Goldberg. He thought this was a good argument for invading Iraq:

>Q: If you’re a new sheriff in a really bad town, what’s one of the smartest things you can do?

>A: Smack the stuffing out of the nearest, biggest bad guy you can.

>Q: If you’re a new inmate in a rough prison, what’s one of the smartest things you can do?

>A: Pick a fight with the biggest, meanest cat you can — but make sure you can win.

>Q: If you’re a kid and you’ve had enough of the school bullies pants-ing you in the cafeteria, what’s one of the smartest things you can do?

>A: Punch one of them in the nose as hard as you can and then stand your ground.

>Q: If you’re the leader of a peaceful and prosperous nation which serves as the last best hope of humanity and the backbone of international stability and a bunch of fanatics murder thousands of your people on your own soil, what’s one of the smartest thing you can do?

>A: Knock the crap out of Iraq.

>Why Iraq? Well, there are two answers to that question.

>The first answer is “Why not?” (If it helps, think of Bluto burping “Why not?” in Animal House.)

>The second answer: Iraq deserved it.

>Now. Here’s the important part: Both of these are good answers.

Woodrow Wilson did it too

This is from Jonah Goldberg one long exercise in the tu quoque (among much else):

>At a candidate forum for trial lawyers in Chicago on Sunday, Hillary Rodham Clinton proclaimed that the Bush administration is “the most radical presidency we have ever had.”

>This is, quite simply, absurd. But such boob-bait for the Bush bashers is common today in Democratic circles, just as similar right-wing rhetoric about Bill Clinton was par for the course a decade ago. The culture war, it seems, has distorted how we view politics more than we realize. Trust in government is at historic lows, but faith in one’s own “team” remains remarkably durable. (President Bush’s job-approval rating among Republicans is 80 percent, according to the polling company Rasmussen Reports.)

Then he goes on to criticize Woodrow Wilson.

Nobody is defending Woodrow Wilson. And whether Bill Clinton pardoned convicted felons has nothing to do with whether Scooter Libby deserved a pardon.

On the attack. . .

It’s perpetually entertaining to me when writers for argumentative partisan publications fail to understand or appreciate the basic idea of an argument. An argument, as any freshman in philosophy 101 knows, is a series of statement meant to establish some other statement. Rational people make them in order either to convince themselves or others of some proposition. Arguments constitute the very basis of rational discourse between people of differing viewpoints. When those fail, the chanting can begin.

Take these two examples from two National Review Online writers. Cliff May complains:

>I enjoy a good debate as much as the next guy but, increasingly, the next guy doesn’t want to argue — he wants to demonize me. He doesn’t want to win the debate; he wants to shut it down.

>Whether the topic is global warming or Saddam Hussein’s links to terrorists, daring to contradict the “consensus” brings hoots and hollers and worse. My most recent experience with such intolerance of diversity of opinion may be instructive.

He then goes on to point out an instance in which Glenn Greenwald argued with him–I mean, “went on the attack”:

>Glenn Greenwald, at the online magazine Salon, went on the attack — but what he had to say was oddly non-responsive to my question. To establish that the voters’ message in November had been “Get out of Iraq!” would require showing that candidates, particularly in competitive races, had pledged to support what Greenwald calls a “Congressionally compelled withdrawal of troops from Iraq by a date certain.”

And it continues. But it’s obvious that the evidence May gathers for people not wanting to argue makes exactly the opposite point. May didn’t argue anything. He asserted some claim that was challenged by someone else. That’s what an argument is. He’s not attacking you, he’s questioning whether what you say is true. The difference ought to be clear.

The second item comes from Jonah Goldberg, writing for National Review Online as well. He writes:

>I try not to let the lefty piling-on of late bug me. But that doesn’t mean it’s not nice to have someone stick up for me every now and then. So many thanks to Steve Burton over at Right Reason for recognizing that, whatever my faults, there is something like a Goldberg Derangement Syndrome out there (as one reader puts it).

As May points out in his piece, some people (an emailer in his case–nutpicking again) won’t engage. But many do. And it’s wrong to lump all of your critics in the same group. Learn to tell the difference.

So yesterday

Jonah Goldberg recently claimed to be interested in arguments–real arguments. But nope. You can’t really be interested in real arguments when the backdrop of your analysis is this:

>Maybe I’m remembering this wrong. But I could have sworn we spent the last seven years talking about how the Republican Party is the party of backward red states–where hate is a family value, fluffy animals are shot, and God is everyone’s co-pilot–and how the Democratic Party is the avant-garde of the peace-loving, Europe-copycatting blue states, where Christianity is a troubling “lifestyle choice,” animals are for hugging, and hate is never, ever a family value.

You’re remembering it wrong indeed. What’s weirder is the paragraph which follows the above:

>Admittedly, over time the red state-blue state thing was eclipsed by other cliches about how the GOP had been hijacked by “theocrats” or by K Street corporate lickspittles, warmongers, immigrant-haters, hurricane-ignoring nincompoops and, for a moment during the Mark Foley scandal, cybersex offenders. I can dredge up all the relevant quotes, but if you’ve been paying attention, I shouldn’t have to.

Cliches? Perhaps someone can remind Goldberg that facts are not cliches.

Trust but verify

Found this wandering about the blogosphera and we were impressed by the bolded claim by Jonah Goldberg (yesterday was his big day):

>You know, Jim does make a good case and I hope he’s right. I think about this a lot. I get a lot of grief from longtime readers about how I’ve “matured” or “grown up.” And the truth is I have. Though I still think there’s a lot of room left for humor (and once the book’s done and put to bed, I’ll bring back some pull-my-finger G-Filing), I’m basically burnt out on the smash-mouth stuff. When I criticize younger lefty bloggers for their excesses, I get a lot of “Hello Mr. Kettle, pot’s calling on line one” grief. That’s all fair to a point. But the basic fact is I don’t do that stuff very much any more because it’s cliched and boring to me (in much the same way I dropped most of the Simpsons and French-bashing stuff the moment it threatened to become a catch-phrasey schtick). I did that back when the blogosphere was brand new, I was young, and the Rolling Stones were only on their 33rd comeback tour.

>Simply as a writer, when I see the nasty stuff now, on both the left and the right, my first reaction is to think how easy — and therefore uninteresting — it is. The Edwards bloggers’ anti-Catholic diatribes bore me more than they offend me because they are precisely the sort of thing you’d expect to hear from a living cliche who can’t imagine the other side might be worth listening too. That’s why I harp so much lately on the issue of good faith in writers (See my recent bloggingheads appearance for example) and why I like debating Peter Beinart so much. I’m more interested in arguments than posturing for your own side. Liberal bloggers like Kevin Drum actually hold open the possibility that the opposition might have a point. The Pandagon crowd is all about cheerleading. Cheerleading has its place, but it’s only of use to those who already agree with the cheerleaders. That’s why I’ll read Drum, but I ignore most of the lefty bloggers. Who has the time to waste on what amount to tasteless joke contests about the “enemy” when you’re the enemy and, in my case, you’re the butt of the jokes? I have a similar attitude toward the highchair pounders on our side like, say, Michael Savage (assuming he’s still alive).

>Ramesh once said to me that he wants to grapple with the left’s best ideas, not their worst. And while I think it’s important to point out how bad the really bad ideas are (and have fun doing it), I think he has the right idea. If the human sacrifice of these bloggers helps move the blogosphere in that direction, it’ll be a win for the Republic.

Our necks hurt from nodding so much. But we’ll be watching, as we already have. Click here for that.

No comment

Here’s one from Jonah Goldberg that speaks for itself:

>Pinochet’s abuses helped create a civil society. Once the initial bloodshed subsided, Chile was no prison. Pinochet built up democratic institutions and infrastructure. And by implementing free-market reforms, he lifted the Chilean people out of poverty. In 1988 he held a referendum and stepped down when the people voted him out. Yes, he feathered his nest from the treasury and took measures to protect himself from his enemies. His list of sins–both venal and moral–is long. But today Chile is a thriving, healthy democracy. Its economy is the envy of Latin America, and its literacy and infant mortality rates are impressive.

By the way, I’m a big believer in competence and expertise in matters of war and peace. So here’s a little bet that Goldberg made in February 2005 with Juan Cole:

>Anyway, I do think my judgment is superior to his when it comes to the big picture. So, I have an idea: Since he doesn’t want to debate anything except his own brilliance, let’s make a bet. I predict that Iraq won’t have a civil war, that it will have a viable constitution, and that a majority of Iraqis and Americans will, in two years time, agree that the war was worth it. I’ll bet $1,000 (which I can hardly spare right now). This way neither of us can hide behind clever word play or CV reading. If there’s another reasonable wager Cole wants to offer which would measure our judgment, I’m all ears. Money where your mouth is, doc. One caveat: Because I don’t think it’s right to bet on such serious matters for personal gain, if I win, I’ll donate the money to the USO. He can give it to the al Aqsa Martyrs Brigade or whatever his favorite charity is.

It’s been almost two years.

Peanut Parents

Adults never appear in the Peanuts cartoons; one only hears their voices uttering nonsensical noises: waw waw waw waw. Much the same is the case for the adults in any of Jonah Goldberg’s columns. But today this is literally true:

>There are two obvious ways to save the bankrupt liberal talk-radio network Air America: Get Al Franken some new, funny material and hire a Lou Dobbs. I say “a” Lou Dobbs because the CNN host himself is probably too expensive, but his limousine populism is pretty easy to rip off: “Blah, blah, blah. Corporations are out to get you, Washington has sold you out, the fat cats have declared war on the little guy,” and so on.

I’ve asked this before: need we even bother?

Dumbed down

Even the most bellicose of conservative pundits has begun to face up to stupid ugly reality. Not to worry. They’re not in danger of critical reflection. With such consistency, the hobglobins would have nothing to do. So, Jonah Goldberg:

>The Iraq war was a mistake.

Great. Now let the lesson-learning begin:

>In the dumbed-down debate we’re having, there are only two sides: pro-war and anti-war. This is silly. First, very few folks who favored the Iraq invasion are abstractly pro-war. Second, anti-war types aren’t really pacifists. They favor military intervention when it comes to stopping genocide in Darfur or starvation in Somalia or doing whatever it was that President Bill Clinton did in Haiti. In other words, their objection isn’t to war per se; it’s to wars that advance U.S. interests (or, allegedly, Bush’s or Israel’s or Exxon Mobil’s interests).

The obvious lesson to draw from this–as the rest of this column illlustrates–is that Goldberg bears no small measure of responsibility for the dumb debate we have been forced to have. In the first place, only in the bifurcated minds of pundits have there been two sides–pro-war and anti-war. Second, the objection of the anti-war crowd cannot properly be characterized as against “wars that advance U.S. Interests” or the even more strawmanish “Bush’s or Israel’s or Exxon Mobil’s interests.” Many of those opposed to the Iraq war used Dick Cheney’s Gulf War I arguments or other largely interest-driven objections. The war, whatever you want to call it, has not advanced U.S. interests, as many at the time argued. Pundits like Goldberg challenged their sanity and their patriotism (links later). Goldberg owes his readers an apology.

In lieu of that, perhaps he could just stop writing his column. If anyone wants to run through the rest of this column, feel free.

Sometimes appealing to the people isn’t fallacious

For once in his life, Jonah Goldberg is confused. He doesn’t see how sometimes you can be for something, and sometimes against something like that thing. So it’s inconstent, he charges, that Democrats favored multilateralism on Iraq and criticized Bush for unilateralism, but on North Korea, they seem to favor the opposite. Never mind that Bush isn’t consistent (and the justification of that inconsistency is Goldberg’s point). Somewhere along the way to making that claim he makes the following attempt to identify the ad populum fallacy (or the appeal to the people):

>Initially, Sen. John Kerry’s (D-Mass.) chief complaint against the Iraq war was that President Bush didn’t build a giant multinational coalition like his dad did, as if the argument for war depended on whether Belize and Burkina Faso agreed with us.

>If it was right to topple Saddam Hussein, it was right even if no one else agreed. And if it was wrong, then it was wrong even if the world was on our side. Lynch mobs aren’t right because they have numbers on their side, and men who stand up to them aren’t wrong because they stand alone.

Goldberg isn’t guilty of the fallacy–he just falsely accuses someone else of it. First, Kerry’s complaint was not with the justification for war (as Goldberg wrongly alleges) but with the means of going about it. For Kerry to be guilty of the ad populum fallacy here, he would have to say the truth of the charges (or the cogency of the justification) relied on the collective assent of the “mob.”

Second, one central tenet of just war theory is “reasonable probability of success.” Even though I can’t remember anyone arguing this, our go-it-nearly-alone strategy (as well as the sheer incompetence of our leadership) weakened the justification for going to war. So it’s just wrong to say that “it’s right to topple Saddam even if no one agreed.” It’s right to try to topple Saddam when you can topple Saddam (and besides–what was the war all about anyway? Toppling Saddam wasn’t the only justification or goal of the war, or so I seem to remember. . . ) with reasonable probability of not making things worse. Going it alone increased the chances of making things worse than Saddam. And to that extent, the collective assent of the mob matters.

Twenty-four

We might call a new argument for torture the “24 argument”. Whatever works on the fictional TV show 24 (a) really works in reality and (b) tacitly approved by the shows fans, who think it’s a documentary. Among these fans is Jonah Goldberg, he writes:

>Yet, according to the torture prohibitionists, there must be a complete ban on anything that even looks like torture, regardless of context, even though we’d never dream of a blanket ban on killing.

>One reason for this disconnect is that we’ve thought a lot about killing and barely at all about torture. Almost no one opposes killing in all circumstances; wars sometimes need to be fought, the hopelessly suffering may require relief, we reserve the right to self-defense. The law recognizes a host of nuances when it comes to homicide, and the place where everybody draws an unambiguous line on killing is at something we call “murder.”

>But there is no equivalent word for murder when it comes to torture. It’s always evil. Yet that’s not our universal reaction. In movies and on TV, good men force evil men to give up information via methods no nicer than what the CIA is allegedly employing. If torture is a categorical evil, shouldn’t we boo Jack Bauer on Fox’s “24”? There’s a reason we keep hearing about the ticking time bomb scenario in the torture debate: Is abuse justified in getting a prisoner to reveal the location of a bomb that would kill many when detonated? We understand that in such a situation, Americans would expect to be protected. That’s why human-rights activists have tried to declare this scenario a red herring.

Need we point out the obvious? (1) The scenarios on the TV show “24” are fictional. Fictional means “made up,” or “invented.” If they are used to test our moral intuitions, then we must keep in mind that they have been written for dramatic effect (and that the show’s premise is that Jack Bauer has yet another fast-paced 24-hour period to save us from someone). So someone who gives up the location of a ticking bomb under torture on the TV show does not mean either that the scenario might obtain in reality or that the person would not lie to great effect. (2) Most people watch a fictional TV show in order to be entertained and just because they watch it doesn’t mean they believe it. (3) We have provisions in our Constitution and criminal procedure that ban torture (even in the case of the ticking bomb and so forth). Perhaps the proponents of torture ought to look to those actual legal and ethical principles for guidance on this question.