Both John and I simultaneously wrote posts on Krauthammer's column this morning. You'll find mine below this note, and his immediately following this one.
The contrast might be interesting: while recognizing similar points of concern with Krauthammer's column, we describe them in very different ways.
There's a certain laughable cluelessness about George Will. One can seriously wonder whether he really knows that most of his columns advance the shakiest and silliest of arguments. The same is not true of Charles Krauthammer, his arguments advance a fairly malicious brand of sophistry–in particular, the sophistry of wrongly or dishonestly (i.e., by distortion) claiming others guilty of sophistry. See for instance his column on Friday (cf., the greatest non sequitur ever foisted)
Today the topic is stem cells. Two things. Krauthammer is not incapable of making a reasonable argument, and the stem cell issue deserves to be approached with some amount of seriousness. Having said that, it seems that Krauthammer in his most recent column does not approach the issue very seriously. Here's the first bit of unseriousness:
I am not religious. I do not believe that personhood is conferred upon conception. But I also do not believe that a human embryo is the moral equivalent of a hangnail and deserves no more respect than an appendix. Moreover, given the protean power of embryonic manipulation, the temptation it presents to science and the well-recorded human propensity for evil even in the pursuit of good, lines must be drawn. I suggested the bright line prohibiting the deliberate creation of human embryos solely for the instrumental purpose of research — a clear violation of the categorical imperative not to make a human life (even if only a potential human life) a means rather than an end.
On this, Obama has nothing to say. He leaves it entirely to the scientists. This is more than moral abdication. It is acquiescence to the mystique of "science" and its inherent moral benevolence. How anyone as sophisticated as Obama can believe this within living memory of Mengele and Tuskegee and the fake (and coercive) South Korean stem cell research is hard to fathom.
The first part of the second paragraph is false in the sense that Obama does not leave the matter entirely to scientists. But the second part is a bit of ridiculous hyberbole of the slippery slope variety: if we leave the matter entirely to scientits (who are amoral!), we will get Joseph Mengele (that's a very swift violation of Godwin's law by the way). Here, for reference, is the relevant section of Obama's speech:
I can also promise that we will never undertake this research lightly. We will support it only when it is both scientifically worthy and responsibly conducted. We will develop strict guidelines, which we will rigorously enforce, because we cannot ever tolerate misuse or abuse. And we will ensure that our government never opens the door to the use of cloning for human reproduction. It is dangerous, profoundly wrong, and has no place in our society, or any society.
Moving on to the more malicious bits. Here's Krauthammer again:
That part of the ceremony, watched from the safe distance of my office, made me uneasy. The other part — the ostentatious issuance of a memorandum on "restoring scientific integrity to government decision-making" — would have made me walk out.
Restoring? The implication, of course, is that while Obama is guided solely by science, Bush was driven by dogma, ideology and politics.
It's not a stretch to suggest that the Bush administration had a particular disdain for science and scientists who disagreed with their policy agenda. See The Republican War on Science, 238ff, for why someone might plausibly assert such a thing about the Bush administration (so spare us the feigned shock please). But more specifically, the "implication" (that's a logic term) is not that Obama is guided soley (you'll see what he does with this in a moment) by science. That is an overly strong and decidedly uncharitable version of the claim Obama is making. Continuing:
What an outrage. Bush's nationally televised stem cell speech was the most morally serious address on medical ethics ever given by an American president. It was so scrupulous in presenting the best case for both his view and the contrary view that until the last few minutes, the listener had no idea where Bush would come out.
Obama's address was morally unserious in the extreme. It was populated, as his didactic discourses always are, with a forest of straw men. Such as his admonition that we must resist the "false choice between sound science and moral values." Yet, exactly 2 minutes and 12 seconds later he went on to declare that he would never open the door to the "use of cloning for human reproduction."
Does he not think that a cloned human would be of extraordinary scientific interest? And yet he banned it.
Is he so obtuse as not to see that he had just made a choice of ethics over science? Yet, unlike Bush, who painstakingly explained the balance of ethical and scientific goods he was trying to achieve, Obama did not even pretend to make the case why some practices are morally permissible and others not.
This is not just intellectual laziness. It is the moral arrogance of a man who continuously dismisses his critics as ideological while he is guided exclusively by pragmatism (in economics, social policy, foreign policy) and science in medical ethics.
Science has everything to say about what is possible. Science has nothing to say about what is permissible. Obama's pretense that he will "restore science to its rightful place" and make science, not ideology, dispositive in moral debates is yet more rhetorical sleight of hand — this time to abdicate decision-making and color his own ideological preferences as authentically "scientific."
No straw man has been identified, however: Obama has argued that the choice between the two is false, so naturally he does not choose between the two! (See the quote above). Besides, Obama obviously does not share (see quote above) Krauthammer's nihilistic conception of science, nor does he intend to allow such a science to exist or flourish on the federal dime. Obama has made it pretty clear that he thinks Bush's restrictions, however surprisingly or drammatically delivered, to be out of sync with where we are scientifically and ethically. Such an argument, outlined earlier in the speech, does not entail now that anything goes or that there is no moral basis for his view–that would be a falsely dichotomous understanding of ethics and a complete distortion of what Obama said. The weirdest thing about all of this is that Krauthammer seems to agree with Obama's position.
In any case, it is obvious that the issue of stem cell research is a morally intricate one–one that deserves more serious discussion than Krauthammer would allow.
In today's New York Times David Brooks argues that Sarah Palin does not have the experience to be Vice President and therefore President. He joins a growing chorus (he says) of conservative pundits who make this argument. I can't say of course that I disagree with him or them. But my interest in punditry here has little to do with agreement or disagreement. For even in getting to this obvious conclusion, that Palin does not have the requisite experience to be a candidate for such an office, Brooks still encounters logical difficulty. He cannot escape what has become the single most defining rhetorical trope of his intellectual career–the dichotomy.
Brooks's dichotomies are not always fallacious ones–it's more often the case in fact that they are not. A false dichotomy, the reader may remember, suggests two radically opposed and exhaustive possibilities, one completely ridiculous, one your view, as a means of suggesting your view has a kind of deductive support. On further reflection, of course, one finds there are many shades of opposition to your view, so therefore the dichotomy, and the force it gives your position, is false. So, for instance, you either endorse constitutional overreach, or you support the enemy and are thus a traitor. Since one does not want to be a traitor, one finds one must support constitutional overreach. But then it occurs to one that maybe there are other alternatives to constitutional overreach, so one discovers the dichotomy is false. That's the fallacious false dichotomy. Don't get me wrong, Brooks does it a lot. Today, however, it just the rhetorically false dichotomy. He writes:
There was a time when conservatives did not argue about this. Conservatism was once a frankly elitist movement. Conservatives stood against radical egalitarianism and the destruction of rigorous standards. They stood up for classical education, hard-earned knowledge, experience and prudence. Wisdom was acquired through immersion in the best that has been thought and said.
But, especially in America, there has always been a separate, populist, strain. For those in this school, book knowledge is suspect but practical knowledge is respected. The city is corrupting and the universities are kindergartens for overeducated fools.
The elitists favor sophistication, but the common-sense folk favor simplicity. The elitists favor deliberation, but the populists favor instinct.
This populist tendency produced the term-limits movement based on the belief that time in government destroys character but contact with grass-roots America gives one grounding in real life. And now it has produced Sarah Palin.
People may think this has a kind of sophistication to it–wow Brooks can really distill cultural, economic, and political tendencies can't he!–but it's rather a silly way of looking at complex historical, cultural, etc., phenomena. He has, in other words, just pulled this out of his ass. A minimum of inspection will reveal these things are hardly as opposed as he suggests–especially the small town/big city dichotomy.
Where he gets into logical trouble today is elsewhere, however. He continues the narrative that Democratic elites' main objection consists in the fact that Palin does not eat arugula:
Palin is the ultimate small-town renegade rising from the frontier to do battle with the corrupt establishment. Her followers take pride in the way she has aroused fear, hatred and panic in the minds of the liberal elite. The feminists declare that she’s not a real woman because she doesn’t hew to their rigid categories. People who’ve never been in a Wal-Mart think she is parochial because she has never summered in Tuscany.
Look at the condescension and snobbery oozing from elite quarters, her backers say. Look at the endless string of vicious, one-sided attacks in the news media. This is what elites produce. This is why regular people need to take control.
These two paragraphs distill the Palin/McCain campaign's political strategy: call everyone who disagrees with Sarah Palin a cultural elite, characterize the media as the enemy, and so forth. It's one massive straw man. But as long as they keep fighting it, the media will keep covering it, remarking on McCain's brilliant strategy in attacking the straw man, and in knocking him down, all the while they will keep asking why Obama can't get them interested in a real fight, and why this makes Obama weak.
But back to Brooks. Having repeated eight years' worth of straw men, he joins the opposition and claims their arguments, repeated anywhere and everywhere for the last eight plus years, as his own:
And there’s a serious argument here. In the current Weekly Standard, Steven Hayward argues that the nation’s founders wanted uncertified citizens to hold the highest offices in the land. They did not believe in a separate class of professional executives. They wanted rough and rooted people like Palin.
But before I get to those, I should remark that the above argument would be a false dichotomy. There's an obvious middle ground between a separate class of executives and caricatured portraits of mountain folk. But I digress, back to Brooks's agreement with everything he has ridiculed:
I would have more sympathy for this view if I hadn’t just lived through the last eight years. For if the Bush administration was anything, it was the anti-establishment attitude put into executive practice.
And the problem with this attitude is that, especially in his first term, it made Bush inept at governance. It turns out that governance, the creation and execution of policy, is hard. It requires acquired skills. Most of all, it requires prudence.
Yes. And I think of all of the energetic sophistries Brooks has produced in favor of this ineptness.
Now perhaps that the answer is likely to be "sadly, no," George Will no longer wants to hear the question: "are you better off than you were four years ago?" In all fairness, his problem is McCain's use of this very Reaganite phrase. When Reagan used it, of course, it made sense:
The nation considered the answer obvious. Reeling from oil shocks worse than today's, with 52 U.S. hostages in Tehran and with the Soviet Union rampant in Afghanistan, voters resoundingly said no. Today we know that the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan hastened the collapse of the Evil Empire, so some things that seem to make us worse off are not unmixed curses.
Take heart America, look on the bright side. In Will's defense, there are any number of reasons to reject this particular political device. I might say in the first place that McCain looks like a fool asking it, considering his the Republican candidate for President. As Will points out, it's a fairly vague question, but I would say that's its rhetorical, not logical, appeal. Here is, however, one reason not to reject it:
The people asking and those answering the "better off" question seem to assume that the only facts that matter are those that can be expressed as economic statistics. Statistics are fine as far as they go, but they do not go very far in measuring life as actually lived.
No one really assumes that economic facts are the only relevant ones. And it also would be supremely disingenuous to suggest the question ought to consider the accumulation of good memories:
Suppose in those years you read "Middlemarch," rediscovered Fred Astaire's movies, took up fly-fishing, saw Chartres and acquired grandchildren. Even if the value of your stock portfolio is down since 2004 (the Dow actually is up), are you not decidedly better off?
Sheez. Most people hearing that question would assume its non of the asker's business whether they've had a good time in their personal life these past four years. But what looked initially like straw man in its misrepresentation of the question, now turns into an excursus on the meaning of life, David Brooks style:
We do, unfortunately, live, as Edmund Burke lamented, in an age of "economists and calculators" who are eager to reduce all things to the dust of numeracy, neglecting what Burke called "the decent drapery of life." In this supposedly rational and scientific age, the thirst for simple metrics seduces people into a preoccupation with things that lend themselves to quantification.
Self-consciously "modern" people have an urge to reduce assessments of their lives to things that can be presented in tables, charts and graphs — personal and national economic statistics. This sharpens their minds by narrowing them. Such people might as well measure out their lives in coffee spoons.
So now if you care to consider your economic status now versus four years ago, you measure your life in coffee spoons? Now it's a false dichotomy: you either consider your reading of Middlemarch, your grandchildren, and baseball fandom have made your life better (despite your home foreclosure and costs of medication), or you are an economic reductionist.
On the theme of taking pride in being ignorant, here's Michael Gerson on Barack Obama:
What took place instead under Warren's precise and revealing questioning was the most important event so far of the 2008 campaign — a performance every voter should seek out on the Internet and watch.
First, the forum previewed the stylistic battle lines of the contest ahead, and it should give Democrats pause. Obama was fluent, cool and cerebral — the qualities that made Adlai Stevenson interesting but did not make him president. Obama took care to point out that he had once been a professor at the University of Chicago, but that bit of biography was unnecessary. His whole manner smacks of chalkboards and campus ivy. Issues from stem cell research to the nature of evil are weighed, analyzed and explained instead of confronted.
Weighing, analyzing, and explaining them does not entail not confronting these issues. Indeed, I shudder at the confronting that does not follow the weighing, the analyzing and the explaining.
One more thing. Later in the piece, Gerson writes:
Obama's response on abortion — the issue that remains his largest obstacle to evangelical support — bordered on a gaffe. Asked by Warren at what point in its development a baby gains "human rights," Obama said that such determinations were "above my pay grade" — a silly answer to a sophisticated question. If Obama is genuinely unsure about this matter, he (and the law) should err in favor of protecting innocent life. If Obama believes that a baby in the womb lacks human rights, he should say so — pro-choice men and women must affirm (as many sincerely do) that developing life has a lesser status. Here the professor failed the test of logic.
It doesn't follow by a matter of logic alone that "uncertainty" in the matter should tend one way rather than the other. Besides, the mother's autonomy seems more well established than the fetus' personhood, so one could say well established rights should take precedence (in the case of conflict). But Gerson obviously distorted Obama's point. Aside from this, Warren's framing of the question ("gains rights") is devious: human rights are not "gained" and "lost" (except in certain places) as one accumulates chips. You have them or you don't. Suggesting otherwise (in the case of the fetus) seems something of a heap paradox: when is a heap a heap? Two? Three?
There may, of course, be nothing wrong with the "heap" view of rights, Warren (and Gerson) just ought to acknowledge when it has been sneaked into a question to a pro-choice Presidential candidate in front of an admittedly hostile pro-life audience. In light of those facts, Obama's answer–with its weighing, analyzing, and confronting–was right on point.
H/t mahablog
I don't think Paul Krugman has been at his best lately. Perhaps, as someone here suggested, the problem is that he's strayed too far from economics, his home base. Well today he writes about economics, home ownership, and he seems to mess it up. Unlike many of the people we talk about here, Krugman has shown that he's better than this. So it's sad to see him write:
But here’s a question rarely asked, at least in Washington: Why should ever-increasing homeownership be a policy goal? How many people should own homes, anyway?
Listening to politicians, you’d think that every family should own its home — in fact, that you’re not a real American unless you’re a homeowner. “If you own something,” Mr. Bush once declared, “you have a vital stake in the future of our country.” Presumably, then, citizens who live in rented housing, and therefore lack that “vital stake,” can’t be properly patriotic. Bring back property qualifications for voting!
Even Democrats seem to share the sense that Americans who don’t own houses are second-class citizens. Early last year, just as the mortgage meltdown was beginning, Austan Goolsbee, a University of Chicago economist who is one of Barack Obama’s top advisers, warned against a crackdown on subprime lending. “For be it ever so humble,” he wrote, “there really is no place like home, even if it does come with a balloon payment mortgage.”
The first question, however jarring, seems to be a legitimate one. But it ought to be directed at our intuitions about home ownership (that it gives you more of a stake in your neighborhood, etc.). Instead, Krugman aims this one first at what is clearly a caricature of the advocates of home ownership–one that barely even satisfies its own ridiculousness.
This is really a shame. It's nice to have one's intuitions challenged. Krugman could have done this well, had it not been for his George Will style "presumably" argument.
To my mind at least, the op-ed in a major national newspaper aims at a general audience–including if not composed entirely of people whose views differ from that of the writer. The point, in fact, in writing one of these pieces is to convince people who disagree with you of the strength of your view. Some writers, like E.J.Dionne (sorry I keep saying this–but it's true) don't seem to have a view to advocate. Others, like Paul Krugman, George Will, Charles Krauthammer, and Michael Gerson (to name a few) most definitely do. Gerson, after all, worked as a speech writer for the current President. That's the very definition of political advocacy.
Should this political hack write for the Washington Post op-ed page? I'm inclined to say no, because the current administration has enough paid advocates and media access (Fox news anyone?); it's hard to see in other words what Gerson, as a political hack, brings to the discussion that can't be found elsewhere–besides, his words have been driving the discussion ("axis of evil" etc.) for years now.
So when he oils up and engages the "liberal view" one can only shake one's head at the inanity. Today he writes:
There are few things in American politics more irrationally ideological, more fanatically faith-based, than the accusation that Republicans are conducting a "war on science."
Few things, really? This would mean that the current administration does not disregard scientists or punish those whose views disagree with their own, cultivate skepticism about widely understood phenomena, and so forth. The documentary evidence for those things is too overwhelming to be disregarded as faith-based (which, by the way, is a silly twist of a twist of a phrase probably excogitated by Gerson himself). Since Gerson seems to know that claim is false, he switches his focus ever so slightly to the political debate:
For the most part, these accusations are a political ploy — actually an attempt to shut down political debate. Any practical concern about the content of government sex-education curricula is labeled "anti-science." Any ethical question about the destruction of human embryos to harvest their cells is dismissed as "theological" and thus illegitimate.
Liberal views are "objective" while traditional moral convictions are "biased." Public scrutiny of scientific practices is "politicizing" important decisions.
These arguments are seriously made, but they are not to be taken seriously. Does anyone really believe in a science without moral and legal limits? In harvesting organs from prisoners? In systematically getting rid of the disabled?
Harvesting organs from prisoners. Hm. I think Gerson is talking here about moral questions relating to science. No one has advocated that that debate be shut down. Nor has anyone (by "anyone" I mean the minimally reasonable but informed person) suggested that there be no debate about the practical recommendations of scientific "conclusions."
What to do about global warming? Well, it's happening–that's what scientists say–so now it's time for a political discussion about what to do. That's a rather different thing from denying that it's happening–which is what the "war on science" is all about. And Gerson cannot possibly claim that there isn't a strong global warming denier movement in the Republican party.
It turns out, however, that Gerson means to claim that because liberals embrace scientific questions of fact, that they therefore embrace scientific definitions of value. I can't think of what the justification for this claim would be, other than that Gerson has no understanding of that distinction. He writes:
This last question, alas, does not answer itself. In America, the lives of about nine of 10 children with Down syndrome are ended before birth. In Europe, about 40 percent of unborn children with major congenital disorders are aborted.
All of which highlights a real conflict, a war within liberalism between the idea of unrestricted science in the cause of health and the principle that all men are created equal — between humanitarianism and egalitarianism.
In "Science and the Left," his insightful article in the latest issue of the New Atlantis, Yuval Levin argues that a belief in the power of science is central to the development of liberalism — based on the assertion that objective facts and rational planning can replace tradition and religious authority in the organization of society. Levin summarizes the liberal promise this way: "The past was rooted in error and prejudice while the future would have at its disposal a new oracle of genuine truth."
But the oracle of science is silent on certain essential topics. "Science, simply put," says Levin, "cannot account for human equality, and does not offer reasons to believe we are all equal. Science measures our material and animal qualities, and it finds them to be patently unequal."
Since there is distinction between fact and value–and a vigorous discussion over those terms in the scientific (broadly speaking) community, I can't figure who Gerson is talking about. Besides, the alternative to the strictly "scientist" point of view is not religious or traditional authority (whose grasp, by the way, of human rights, equality, and so forth, seems tenuous at best).
But as Gerson seems little interested in the actual objection to the administration's handling of matters of scientific fact, one can see that he has little use for logic as well.
Two interesting quotations from Ruth Marcus’s Washington Post column–One pro John Yoo, tortured torture memo writer, one contra. The first one, from Columbia University law Professor Scott Horton, addresses someone (Elder) who does not find Yoo’s legal work grounds for discipline or revocation of his tenure at Berkeley. He says that Elder
"is appropriately concerned about freedom of expression for his
faculty. But he should be much more concerned about the message that
all of this sends to his students. Lawyers who act on the public stage
can have an enormous impact on their society and the world around them.
. . . Does Dean Edley really imagine that their work is subject to no
principle of accountability because they are mere drones dispensing
legal analysis?"
There’s a wide gulf between "not punishable in this instance by the University" and "subject to no principle of accountability." Horton sets up a false dichotomy–accountable or not.
On the pro-Yoo side:
The most useful analogy I’ve read on this subject comes from Princeton
professor Deborah Pearlstein, who asked what Berkeley would do if a
molecular biology professor "had written a medical opinion while in
government employ disclaiming the truth of evolution," and continued to
dispute the theory of evolution once he resumed teaching.Pearlstein,
a human rights lawyer, found Yoo’s memo "blatantly, embarrassingly
wrong under the law," but she conceded that legal conclusions lack the
hard certainty of scientific truth. Yoo should no more be removed from
a teaching job than a Supreme Court justice who writes a despicable
opinion — upholding slavery, allowing separate but equal facilities,
permitting the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II —
should be impeached.
I’m confused by the analogy in the first paragraph. If that’s the case, then indeed Yoo ought to be fired for not having competence in his subject matter. Academic freedom ought not be a cover for incompetence. But I doubt he would have gotten that far anyway.
The second paragraph rings odd. And it hardly makes the point that Yoo ought to be protected from firing. Any Supreme Court judge who argues for slavery ought to be impeached–now (and probably back then as well). Even though legal opinions lack the "hard certainty" of scientific truth (whatever that means), it doesn’t mean that some legal opinions are simply beyond the pale.
By most accounts–even friendly ones–Yoo’s opinions were beyond the pale. The fact is, however, that was a different job. This seems to me to be the key difference that’s being overlooked here. Berkeley was dumb enough to hire him and give him tenure. They ought to be ashamed. But it’s too late now.
Of course, if he broke the law and is found to have committed war crimes, then indeed, he ought to be fired. But that’s a matter for, er, the law.
Like his colleague David Brooks at the New York Times, William Kristol has been pretty much wrong about everything in the past several years (and probably before). But wrongness, when it happens, just doesn’t happen. There’s always a reason for it. So I believe now, at least.
I’m not going to explain the wrongness of William Kristol–he’s wedded to an incoherent ideology, for instance. I don’t know if that’s true, and besides I don’t have access to Kristol’s mental states. So if you read this and you’re a conservative, notice that I haven’t said "conservatives are wrong in their core beliefs." Wrongness always happens in the particulars.
I’m interested in the wrongness of his reasons. To that end, let’s take a look at one or two. In today’s column, he opposes the following claims:
But it’s one thing for a German thinker to assert that “religion is
the sigh of the oppressed creature.” It’s another thing for an American
presidential candidate to claim that we “cling to … religion” out of
economic frustration.And it’s a particularly odd claim for
Barack Obama to make. After all, in his speech at the 2004 Democratic
convention, he emphasized with pride that blue-state Americans, too,
“worship an awesome God.”
That’s obviously not a contradiction or some kind of less rigorous "tension" or "inconsistency." As explanations go, Obama’s seems fairly innocuous. He’s clearly talking about a certain motivation for religion as distinct from say, God, the object of those religions. Attacking this weak version of Obama’s remarks is what you might call a "straw man."
A little charity on Kristol’s part would help him see this. But I ask perhaps too much.
Here’s another:
Then there’s what Obama calls “anti-immigrant sentiment.” Has Obama
done anything to address it? It was John McCain, not Obama, who took
political risks to try to resolve the issue of illegal immigration by
putting his weight behind an attempt at immigration reform.Furthermore, some concerns about unchecked and unmonitored illegal
immigration are surely legitimate. Obama voted in 2006 (to take just
one example) for the Secure Fence Act, which was intended to control
the Mexican border through various means, including hundreds of miles
of border fence. Was Obama then just accommodating bigotry?
Anyone ought to be able to see the difference between criticizing "anti-immigrant sentiment" (which applies to both legal and immigrants) fomented by Kristol’s partners on the right and supporting "unchecked and unmonitored illegal immigration." Being against the latter, of course, doesn’t make you for the former. This amounts to, I think, a kind of red herring. Concern about "Illegal immigration" bears only a slight resemblance to "anti-immigrant sentiment" of the "bigotry" variety.
The following strikes me as a fairly clear instance of a false dichotomy:
For those who see no moral principle underlying American foreign
policy, the Holocaust Declaration is no business of ours. But for those
who believe that America stands for something in the world — that the
nation that has liberated more peoples than any other has even the most
minimal moral vocation — there can be no more pressing cause than
preventing the nuclear annihilation of an allied democracy, the last
refuge and hope of an ancient people openly threatened with the final
Final Solution.
So, to recap: you either (1) have no moral principles; or (2) agree with Charles’ Krauthammer’s "Holocaust Declaration": here’s the Holocaust Declaration:
"It shall be the policy of this nation to regard any nuclear attack
upon Israel by Iran, or originating in Iran, as an attack by Iran on
the United States, requiring a full retaliatory response upon Iran."
There are many reasons to regard such a policy is foolish and immoral. That simple fact alone means Krauthammer cannot claim that even the most "minimal moral vocation" means we must adopt it. Even granting (which we shouldn’t, by the way) that some form of deterrence (of Iran’s as of yet non-existent nuclear capability) is the only available option, there many different ways to achieve that goal than by apocalyptic threats. Adopting those approaches does not mean that one abandons the (dubious to some) claim that America stands for something in the world.