Category Archives: Plain Bad Arguments

Academics, Plain Bad Arguments, Things that are false

Deliver us from evil

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What might the author of this (Barbara Oakley, a professor of engineering and Oakland University) be saying:

>Still, the Virginia Tech shootings have already led to calls for all sorts of changes: gun control, more mental health coverage, stricter behavior rules on campuses. Yes, in a perfect world, there would be no guns, no mental illness and no Cho Seung-Huis. But the world is very imperfect. Consider that Britain’s national experiment with gun-free living is proving to be a disaster, with violent and gun crime rates soaring.

Hate to get into a factual dispute, but:

>The Home Office says that despite the temptation to assume that things are always getting worse, crime in England and Wales actually peaked in 1995 and has now fallen by 44% in the last 10 years.

Even if the crime rate were going up, it probably wouldn’t be “soaring.” But even if it were soaring, I think it would compare favorably with ours. And furthermore, and more fundamentally, whether less gun control would change things for the better is a distinct–a very distinct–question.

On this shaky basis the author moves toward the conclusion:

>In other words, most of the broad social “lessons” we are being told we must learn from the Virginia Tech shootings have little to do with what allowed the horrors to occur. This is about evil, and about how our universities are able to deal with it as a literary subject but not as a fact of life. Can administrators and deans really continue to leave professors and other college personnel to deal with deeply disturbed students on their own, with only pencils in their defense?

She might as well say “some say. . .”. That at least would be more honest about the straw man to follow. But, like Richard Cohen, she doesn’t need to wait for any fancy diagnosis or police investigation: it’s about evil. That’s even less helpful and insightful than her original suggestion. I don’t know of the psychological category for evil. My father, when he was alive, used to commit people like Cho to mental institutions as a danger to themselves or others. There was, and as far as I know, there still is no category called “evil” which is grounds for commitment. But while we were talking about all of this, several psychologically disturbed people just bought guns (legally) to deliver themselves and perhaps some of us from evil.

Academics, Contradictions, Plain Bad Arguments, Stanley Fish

Fish on religion and liberalism

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I think Stanley Fish doesn’t understand either liberalism or religion. He writes (behind the Times firewall):

>First of all, I stipulate to the usefulness of teaching the bible as an aid to the study of literature and history. I’m just saying that when you do that you are teaching religion as a pedagogical resource, not as a distinctive discourse the truth or falsehood of which is a matter of salvation for its adherents. One can of course teach that too; one can, that is, get students to understand that at least some believers hold to their faith in a way that is absolute and exclusionary; in their view nonbelievers have not merely made a mistake – as one might be mistaken about the causes of global warming – they have condemned themselves to eternal perdition. (“I am the way.”) What one cannot do – at least under the liberal democratic dispensation – is teach that assertion of an exclusive and absolute truth as anything but someone’s opinion; and in many classes that opinion will be rehearsed with at best a sympathetic condescension (“let’s hope they grow out of it”) and at worst a condemning ridicule (“even in this day and age, there are benighted people”).

In the first place (as we noted in an earlier post), there’s nothing incoherent about studying the body of propositions that compose any particular religious doctrine without embracing their truth. For instance, Fish has made the doctrine and the seriousness with which its adherents believe it without making us affirm it. If what he said about religion were true–you cannot teach it–then he couldn’t talk about why you can’t. Since you can–he has–then what he says is false.

Second, the Rawlsian liberal will point out that there is no absolute truth when it comes to matters of foundational questions of justice and political structure. This is quite a different claim from that which says there is no absolute truth at all. Liberals are not relativists, as Fish seems to think. There is of course plenty of absolute truth possible in matters empirical. These may inform, but do not form the basis of, our conception of justice. So in the end, no controversial system of value can serve as the basis of a political structure.

Plain Bad Arguments, V.D.Hanson

See it now

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VD Hanson writes:

>Given all of this country’s past wars involving intelligence failures, tactical and strategic blunders, congressional fights and popular anger at the president, Iraq and the rising furor over it are hardly unusual.

No kidding. No one disputes that claim. Then he offers a series of uncontroversial examples and concludes:

>The high-stakes war to stabilize the fragile democracy in Iraq is a serious, costly and controversial business. But so have been most conflicts in American history. We need a little more humility and knowledge of our past–and a lot less hysteria, name-calling and obsession with our present selves.

I would argue it’s too serious for arguments like this whose conclusions incoherently diminish the seriousness of the “serious, costly and controversial business” we have bungled ourselves into. The problem, contrary to what Hanson concludes, is a serious one. And it’s seriousness consists in its happening now and into the near or far future. Our having failed in the past even more miserably, in other words, doesn’t diminish our current responsibility not to fail in the future.

Op-Eds and other opinions, Plain Bad Arguments

Blowing smoke

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Who wouldn’t agree with this claim of Dr.Gio Batta Gori, of the Cato Institute (published in today’s Washington Post):

>Presumably, we are grown-up people, with a civilized sense of fair play, and dedicated to disciplined and rational discourse. We are fortunate enough to live in a free country that is respectful of individual choices and rights, including the right to honest public policies. Still, while much is voiced about the merits of forceful advocacy, not enough is said about the fundamental requisite of advancing public health with sustainable evidence, rather than by dangerous, wanton conjectures.

That admirable goal, however, is not advanced by this sort of thing:

>Lung cancer and cardiovascular diseases develop at advancing ages. Estimating the risk of those diseases posed by secondhand smoke requires knowing the sum of momentary secondhand smoke doses that nonsmokers have internalized over their lifetimes. Such lifetime summations of instant doses are obviously impossible, because concentrations of secondhand smoke in the air, individual rates of inhalation, and metabolic transformations vary from moment to moment, year after year, location to location.

I’m not a scientist. But even I can tell the difference between reasonable objections to basic methodology and pushing goalposts back a little (or in this case a lot further). For, on Dr.Gori’s argument, assessing the effects of secondhand smoke is “impossible.” He continues:

>In an effort to circumvent this capital obstacle, all secondhand smoke studies have estimated risk using a misleading marker of “lifetime exposure.” Yet, instant exposures also vary uncontrollably over time, so lifetime summations of exposure could not be, and were not, measured.

>Typically, the studies asked 60–70 year-old self-declared nonsmokers to recall how many cigarettes, cigars or pipes might have been smoked in their presence during their lifetimes, how thick the smoke might have been in the rooms, whether the windows were open, and similar vagaries. Obtained mostly during brief phone interviews, answers were then recorded as precise measures of lifetime individual exposures.

>In reality, it is impossible to summarize accurately from momentary and vague recalls, and with an absurd expectation of precision, the total exposure to secondhand smoke over more than a half-century of a person’s lifetime. No measure of cumulative lifetime secondhand smoke exposure was ever possible, so the epidemiologic studies estimated risk based not only on an improper marker of exposure, but also on exposure data that are illusory.

Don’t forget to undermine the credibility of the witness:

>Adding confusion, people with lung cancer or cardiovascular disease are prone to amplify their recall of secondhand smoke exposure. Others will fib about being nonsmokers and will contaminate the results. More than two dozen causes of lung cancer are reported in the professional literature, and over 200 for cardiovascular diseases; their likely intrusions have never been credibly measured and controlled in secondhand smoke studies. Thus, the claimed risks are doubly deceptive because of interferences that could not be calculated and corrected.

Lastly, there are good arguments on both sides:

>In addition, results are not consistently reproducible. The majority of studies do not report a statistically significant change in risk from secondhand smoke exposure, some studies show an increase in risk, and ¿ astoundingly ¿ some show a reduction of risk.

A more reasonable interpretation of that situation would be this: assessing secondhand smoke is very tricky, and much like assessing any cancer risk, it involves probabilities and factors that often elude the kind of painful exactitude we would like to demand from our science, but as a matter of fact, almost never get. No one but those ignorant of statistics and the meaning of basic scientific studies–oh, I can think of certain Chief Executives and senators–would make such an absurd demand on that kind of evidence. The bar is too high: count how many times Dr.Gori says “impossible” or denies that the thing in question is not subject to proof. That’s a very decisive conclusion for a scientist. Few I think would agree that such a thing is impossible from the outset. Difficult maybe. But not impossible.

Finally, the careful reader will also note the very narrow scope of Dr.Gori’s analysis: to deny that the evidence shows a decisive causal connection between secondhand smoke and lung cancer and cardiovascular disease. Even if he’s right about that specific and narrow claim, that doesn’t mean secondhand smoke doesn’t play a role in either increasing the risk for those ailments or in exacerbating others.

In the end, there is a more basic question of burden of proof here. At this point, the burden rests with the one who claims that living and working in a smoky environment isn’t bad for you.

Dinesh D'Souza, Equivocation, Plain Bad Arguments

Enemy of the state 2

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A propos of the D’Souza piece yesterday, a commenter wrote:

>It was hard to read a single paragraph (or sentence) in the D’Souza piece without a refutation, often obvious, coming to mind. I was starting to lose count of the straw men alone.

That’s just barely an exaggeration. Here is an edited (not for content) six part analysis of D’Souza’s op-ed. Apologies to those whose comments were lost in the process.

Part I

>As a conservative author, I’m used to a little controversy. Even so, the reaction to my new book, “The Enemy at Home,” has felt, well, a little hysterical.

>”Ratfink writes new book,” James Wolcott, cultural critic for Vanity Fair, declares in his blog. He goes on to call my book a “sleazy, shameless, ignorant, ahistorical, tendentious, meretricious lie.”

>In the pages of Esquire, Mark Warren charges that I “hate America” and have “taken to heart” Osama bin Laden’s view of the United States. (Warren also challenged me to a fight and threatened to put me in the hospital.) In his New York Times review of my book last week, Alan Wolfe calls my work “a national disgrace . . . either self-delusional or dishonest.” I am “a childish thinker” with “no sense of shame,” he argues. “D’Souza writes like a lover spurned; despite all his efforts to reach out to Bin Laden, the man insists on joining forces with the Satanists.”

>It goes on. The Washington Post’s Warren Bass writes that I think Jerry Falwell was “on to something” when he blamed the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, on pagans, gays and the ACLU. Slate’s Timothy Noah diagnoses me with “Mullah envy,” while the Nation’s Katha Pollitt calls me a “surrender monkey” and the headline to her article brands me “Ayatollah D’Souza.” And in my recent appearance on Comedy Central’s “The Colbert Report,” I had to fend off the insistent host. “But you agree with the Islamic radicals, don’t you?” Stephen Colbert asked again and again.

Let me add Michiko Kakutani from the New York Times:

>His new book, “The Enemy at Home,” is filled with willfully incendiary — and preposterous — assertions that “the cultural left in this country is responsible for causing 9/11”; that the left is “secretly allied” with the movement that Osama bin Laden and Islamic radicals represent “to undermine the Bush administration and American foreign policy”; and that “the left wants America to be a shining beacon of global depravity, a kind of Gomorrah on a Hill.”

Part II

>Contrary to the common liberal view, I don’t believe that the 9/11 attacks were payback for U.S. foreign policy. Bin Laden isn’t upset because there are U.S. troops in Mecca, as liberals are fond of saying. (There are no U.S. troops in Mecca.) He isn’t upset because Washington is allied with despotic regimes in the region. Israel aside, what other regimes are there in the Middle East? It isn’t all about Israel. (Why hasn’t al-Qaeda launched a single attack against Israel?) The thrust of the radical Muslim critique of America is that Islam is under attack from the global forces of atheism and immorality — and that the United States is leading that attack.

Just the first claim alone ought to make one bristle. Assertions can be seen to fall into several different categories. But for the moment, let’s say that those assertions which might be labeled “liberal” or “conservative” are prescriptive ones. In other words, they are claims about what we ought to do (not get gay-married or drive fuel-efficient cars are examples of prescriptive-type claims) not about how things are (the average global temperature is rising or Bin Laden said “I hate it when you put your soldiers in the land of holy places”). The second, you might notice, are claims of fact. Claims of fact are neither liberal nor conservative.

How does this relate to the first sentence of D’Souza’s piece? It’s the placement of the adjective. He ought to have said, “many liberals claim that “the 9/11 attacks were payback for U.S. foreign policy.” After all, it’s not a “liberal view,” it’s a view held by liberals. But it’s also a view held by conservatives. It’s wrong therefore–categorically wrong–to submit a factual claim of that nature to an ideological grammar–that’s a category mistake.

Part III

>Contrary to the common liberal view, I don’t believe that the 9/11 attacks were payback for U.S. foreign policy. Bin Laden isn’t upset because there are U.S. troops in Mecca, as liberals are fond of saying. (There are no U.S. troops in Mecca.) He isn’t upset because Washington is allied with despotic regimes in the region. Israel aside, what other regimes are there in the Middle East? It isn’t all about Israel. (Why hasn’t al-Qaeda launched a single attack against Israel?) The thrust of the radical Muslim critique of America is that Islam is under attack from the global forces of atheism and immorality — and that the United States is leading that attack.

The highlighted claim (and the rest of the paragraph) suffer from factual problems (already noticed by reviewers). Warren Bass, writing in the Washington Post, writes:

>D’Souza, the author of the bestselling Illiberal Education, has no particular expertise on terrorism, which may explain why he writes twice that there are U.S. troops in Mecca (someone should probably alert Bob Gates) or why he thinks that President Reagan’s 1986 airstrikes on Libya “convinced Qadafi to retire from the terrorism trade,” despite the bombing of Pan Am 103 by Libyan agents two years later. But D’Souza’s inexperience doesn’t explain why he so badly misreads bin Ladenist ideology, despite the peppering of jihadist quotes that he uses to lend the book a sense of authority.

He’s added the allegation that liberals are responsible for the Mecca claim. Now to Bin Laden’s complaint:

>Of course, the ascetic bin Laden doesn’t like American culture or values, including such far-left ideas as democracy or educating women, but he has a clear politico-religious agenda that’s important to take seriously. You’d never know it from reading D’Souza, but bin Laden’s February 1998 “Declaration of the World Islamic Front for Jihad against the Jews and the Crusaders” — the most considered summation of his casus belli — laid out three main grievances for which al-Qaeda kills. First and foremost comes the post-Gulf crisis deployment of U.S. troops in Saudi Arabia, which are “occupying the lands of Islam in the holiest of its territories” and “using its bases in the peninsula as a spearhead to fight against the neighboring Islamic peoples.” Second comes the supposed Crusader-Jewish alliance’s “long blockade” of the Iraqis, designed “to destroy what remains of this people and to humiliate their Muslim neighbors.” Finally, America’s anti-Muslim wars “also serve the petty state of the Jews, to divert attention from their occupation of Jerusalem and their killing of Muslims in it.” See anything about Hollywood there?

Facts are important.

Part IV

>Contrary to President Bush’s view, they don’t hate us for our freedom, either. Rather, they hate us for how we use our freedom. When Planned Parenthood International opens clinics in non-Western countries and dispenses contraceptives to unmarried girls, many see it as an assault on prevailing religious and traditional values. When human rights groups use their interpretation of international law to pressure non-Western countries to overturn laws against abortion or to liberalize laws regarding homosexuality, the traditional sensibilities of many of the world’s people are violated.

I thought we were talking about Bin Laden and his motivations for recruiting, funding, and inciting suicide terrorism against United States’ military, economic and political targets. But it turns out we’re talking about “their” objection to contraception, premarital sex, and homosexuality. Who are they? People with traditional values in non-Western cultures. Whether these non-Western cultures include Saudi Arabia–where women can’t drive for Chrissake–is left for the reader to conclude. And nevermind that these three things also constitute the core of the Christian right’s position against “secularism” (“how convenient!” the Church Lady might add).

But more fundamentally, while Bin Laden might object to these features of Western Culture, it doesn’t follow from that fact that these things are the features of Western Culture for which he attacked us.

Part V

>This argument has nothing to do with Falwell’s suggestion that 9/11 was God’s judgment on the ACLU and the feminists for their sins. I pose a simple question: Why did the terrorists do it? In a 2003 statement, bin Laden said that to him, the World Trade Center resembled the idols that the prophet Muhammad removed from Mecca. In other words, bin Laden believes that the United States represents the pagan depravity that Muslims have a duty to resist. The literature of radical Islam, such as the works of Egyptian writer Sayyid Qutb, resonates with these themes. One radical sheik even told a European television station a few years ago that although Europe is more decadent than America, the United States is the more vital target because it is U.S. culture — not Swedish culture or French culture — that is spreading throughout the world.

Notice that D’Souza expects us to make two inferences here, both of them unwarranted. First, he wants us to draw the conclusion that the World Trade Center “idols” fall into the same class as the socially progressive ideas (abortion, gay marriage and so forth) he railed against in the previous paragraph, such that an attack on the World Trade Center is an attack on these ideals. They have in common their “westernness” perhaps, but that would be such a broad class of objects that it would amount to nothing at all. But more than that, the progressive ideas D’Souza complains about don’t amount to idols to be worshiped. No one worships gay marriage. But that might, and this is only a suggestion, worship our economic (WTC) and military (the Pentagon) hegemony. There seems to be no connection, in other words, between the World Trade Center (and the Pentagon) and homosexual marriage (the Pentagon actually banned homosexuals from enlisting openly in the armed forces).

Second, D’Souza expects us to believe that Sayyid Qutb who visited the United States in the 1950s (and complained, among other the things about racism, restrictions on divorce, poor haircuts and the mixing of the sexes) and the radical sheik interviewed on European TV accurately represent bin Laden’s motivations more than bin Laden’s own pronouncements (see here for them). There is therefore a much simpler answer to the question “why they attacked us” than the one D’Souza is proposing: ask Bin Laden. He’ll tell you. Asking Sayyid Qutb, who is dead, or a radical sheik who does not represent al Qaeda, why bin Laden attacked the US on 9/11 makes about as much sense as asking Ronald Reagan why George Bush invaded Iraq.

Part VI

So far we have noticed that D’Souza’s apologia suffers from grievous logical and factual problems. And we’ve so far only looked at three paragraphs. But today’s installment is no different:

>What would motivate Muslims in faraway countries to volunteer for martyrdom? The fact that Palestinians don’t have a state? I don’t think so. It’s more likely that they would do it if they feared their values and way of life were threatened. Even as the cultural left accuses Bush of imperialism in invading Iraq, it deflects attention from its own cultural imperialism aimed at secularizing Muslim society and undermining its patriarchal and traditional values. The liberal “solution” to Islamic fundamentalism is itself a source of Islamic hostility to America.

Interpreting the motivations of others–especially warlike ones such as terrorists–is not an easy thing to do. But it’s certainly the case that one cannot do it a priori, as D’Souza has done. “I don’t think so” in other words, does not an argument make. It may be the case that it’s more likely that they would attack us if they felt their way of life was threatened, but that’s not something you can just assert without any evidence. Aside from that, D’Souza excludes the Israel issue by narrowly framing the question. In other words, the Palestinians’ not having a state might not have mattered or matter to Bin Laden and company in that specific sense, but that doesn’t mean that Israel isn’t for them a major source of complaint. In fact, has Bin Laden and the suicide hijackers have said as much. Here’s what the 9/11 Commission Report says:

>In his interactions with other students, Atta voiced virulently anti-Semitic and anti-American opinions, ranging from condemnations of what he described as a global Jewish movement centered in New York City that supposedly controlled the financial world and the media, to polemics against governments of the Arab world. To him, Saddam Hussein was an American stooge set up to give Washington an excuse to intervene in the Middle East (section 5.3).

Nothing about the Palestinians’ statehood. But that doesn’t make D’Souza’s claim any less false.

Op-Eds and other opinions, Plain Bad Arguments

There are good arguments on both sides

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The cop-out position frequently observed in student writing goes something like this: “there are good arguments on both sides, so in the end, who is to say. . .”. But the only time in the history of philosophy where there were good arguments on both sides was the medieval debate about the eternity of the world. The Philosopher and many of his followers held by reason that it was eternal; Scripture teaches that it was created in time. Who is to judge?

Back here on earth, Fred Hiatt sees good arguments on both sides of a more mundane issue: who uses the troops as political props? He writes:

>The truth is, every side in the war debate uses the troops for political gain. When Bush tearfully presents the Medal of Honor to the family of a slain war hero the morning after announcing his latest strategy for Iraq, then flies off to Fort Benning, he is using the troops as props. Democrats didn’t make the absence of body armor a key campaign issue until they had done a lot of poll-testing.

Hiatt puts three activities in the same category: (1) a tearful Medal of Honor award ceremony; (2) speeches before captive audiences; (3) arguments in favor of body-armor for the troops who are really being shot at. Of these only the last has direct application to the reality of the welfare of the troops. And poll-tested or not, no soldier ought to be sent into battle with inadequate body-armor (when better is available). So, arguments about the welfare of the troops don’t belong in the same category as arguments in front of the troops (but not about them). In the first two cases they are props; in the third they are the subject of the debate. In all fairness, of course, no one would suggest that the awarding of the Medal of Honor was not genuine. It’s just a different matter from the current and future welfare of those in harm’s way. When things such as these don’t belong to the same category, you can’t compare them and claim that there are good arguments on both sides and so. . .

>[a]s to the germaneness of the president’s tears or Barbara Boxer’s outrage, Americans can form their own judgments. . .

Op-Eds and other opinions, Plain Bad Arguments

Timed opposition

In today’s Washington Post, Michael O’Hanlon writes:

>However mediocre its prospects, each main element of the president’s plan has some logic behind it. On the military surge itself, critics of the administration’s Iraq policy have consistently argued that the United States never deployed enough soldiers and Marines to Iraq. Now Bush has essentially conceded his critics’ points. To be sure, adding 21,500 American troops (and having them conduct classic counterinsurgency operations) is not a huge change and may be too late.

And he inexplicably concludes from this:

>But it would still be counterintuitive for the president’s critics to prevent him from carrying out the very policy they have collectively recommended.

The president’s critics have offered alternative policies–years ago when such policies had an application. These policy recommendations were time-specific; they were relative to the conditions prior to the previous attempts at “surging” troops. O’Hanlon cannot cite the recommendation abstractly or atemporally as evidence the president’s policy has some logic behind it. People in the past have recommended more troops. But conditions were different. By reacting now, the president has demonstrated his failure to listen to his critics. Not the opposite.

Op-Eds and other opinions, Plain Bad Arguments

Let it ride

30 Comments

Those of you who find religion interesting might find the following piece by Cal Thomas worth a look.

>The Atheist Wager

>I wonder about the question. Why is it “in vogue” to disbelieve in a Creator of the universe, who loves us and wants to have a relationship with us and not “in vogue” to believe?

>Anyway, of course I have conversations with atheists everyday, though I do not always know of their unbelief unless they tell me. We can talk about everything, or nothing. I know some atheists who are pro-life (though they have an inadequate base for being so). That’s because if God is not the Author of life, then we are evolutionary accidents who may treat each other as we please.

>In conversing with an atheist, it is important to understand that such a person will never be brought to faith by information alone, because the same information is available to everyone. If information were sufficient to make a believer out of an atheist, then all would believe.

>It takes more faith not to believe in God than to believe in Him. It is also intellectually lazy. You have to believe the vastness of the universe “happened” without a Designer and that unique things like fingerprints and snowflakes occurred by pure chance.

>An atheist wagers his or her present and eternal future that he or she is right. If the atheist is right and there is no God, there are no consequences. But if the atheist is wrong and there is a God and a Heaven for those who come to Him on His terms, and a Hell for those who reject Him, then that has the most important consequences.

>I do not have the power to persuade anyone that God is, but I can demonstrate the difference He has made in my life and relationships – including with atheists – and pray that the One who brought me to belief will do so with them.

We’re not going to comment, as many have already on the original site.

Happy New to our readers.

E.J.Dionne, Hasty Generalization, Plain Bad Arguments

Old, tired, ineffectual

E.J. Dionne, liberal columnist for the Washington Post, writes:

>In 1984 three exit polls pegged Ronald Reagan’s share of the ballots cast by Americans under 30 at between 57 and 60 percent. Reagan-style conservatism seemed fresh, optimistic and innovative. In 2006 voters under 30 gave 60 percent of their votes to Democratic House candidates, according to the shared media exit poll. Conservatism now looks old, tired and ineffectual.

Those two exit polls don’t establish the claim that conservatism is “old, tired and ineffectual.” Sadly, however, these are the only hard facts cited in the piece. The rest is a series of do-you-remember-whens about NASCAR and evangelical Christianity, how once they seemed ascendant, now they seem reactionary–or, old, tired, and ineffectual. Dionne writes:

>Now the chic medium is televised political comedy and the cool commentators are Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert.

Even though their political fortunes have certainly changed with the recent elections, lots of people still listen to Rush Limbaugh. And the recent election is a phenomenon far too complex to be handled in such a superficial, E-Network kind of way. Besides, the Reagan election comparison is at best a misleading one–and you can’t place it alongside the most recent midterm election without covering over enormous differences (the current disastrous war, scandals, the Katrina disaster, and so on).

As we constantly say of the conservative political media, at least they argue for their positions. While they may argue badly (as we have documented here), at least the advance reasons for positions, rather than nearly fact-free meta-commentary of the political entertainment complex. That, if anything, is old, tired and ineffectual.

Plain Bad Arguments, Robert Kagan

Lessons

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None but the delusional at this point can claim that invading Iraq was anything but a mistake: a colossal error of moral judgment, an arrogant and uncritical analysis of our own motives, and a shallow examination of facts. Those who correctly argued it was a mistake before it happened–the “Cassandras”–haven’t yet been sufficiently praised. On the other hand, those who made the shallow case for war, and impugned the intelligence, sanity, courage, and patriotism of those who didn’t, continue to appear as experts on the TV and in the newspaper. They got it wrong the first time–really really wrong–but despite this they still weigh in now on how to fix it or the lessons to be drawn. Who says Americans do not forgive?

One of these experts is Robert Kagan. Today he considers the lessons not to be drawn from this war:

>The problem for those who have tried to steer the United States away from its long history of expansiveness, then and now, is that Americans’ belief in the possibility of global transformation — the “messianic” impulse — is and always has been the more dominant strain in the nation’s character. It is rooted in the nation’s founding principles and is the hearty offspring of the marriage between Americans’ driving ambitions and their overpowering sense of righteousness.

>Critics have occasionally succeeded in checking these tendencies, temporarily. Failures of world-transforming efforts overseas have also had their effect, but only briefly. Five years after the end of the Vietnam War, which seemed to many to presage the rejection of Achesonian principles of power and ideological triumphalism, Americans elected Ronald Reagan, who took up those principles again with a vengeance.

>Today many hope and believe that the difficulties in Iraq will turn Americans once and for all against ambition and messianism in the world. History is not on their side.

Whatever is going on in Iraq, “difficulties” doesn’t quite do it justice. In its original iteration, Iraq had nothing to do with messianism, and everything to do with 9/11 and the hysteria over terrorism. But for those who argued for the parallel claim that Iraq could be remade on the American model, just because democratic messianism has long been a dominant strain in American foreign policy rhetoric, not necessarily its reality, does not, as the death, destruction and resentment caused by Iraq amply demonstrate, mean that it should be.