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False Dichotomy, Op-Eds and other opinions, Plain Bad Arguments, Suppressed Evidence, William Safire

Therefore, everyone is a neo-conservative

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Last Thursday’s debate seemed to frustrate conservative pundits. There was little to criticize in Kerry’s answers and less to praise in Bush’s. In his editorial yesterday (Source: NYT 10/04/04), William Safire chose a third alternative, praising Kerry. According to Safire, Kerry’s foreign policy has undergone a “sea change.”

> On both military tactics and grand strategy, the newest neoconservative announced doctrines more hawkish than President Bush. . . Last week in debate, John Kerry – until recently, the antiwar candidate too eager to galvanize dovish Democrats – suddenly reversed field, and came down on the side of the military hard-liners.

So Kerry apparently has joined the ranks of the “neo-conservatives” among whom surely Safire intends the intellectuals and apparatchiks who were the masterminds behind the Iraq war. In order to judge this claim, we would first need a clear idea of what constitutes neo-conservatism. We can’t investigate this thoroughly, but perhaps a few general characteristics will help. In its recent appearance in politics, the neo-conservatives have been identified with the activist and interventionist foreign policy that led to the Iraq war. Neo-conservatives believe that “national interests” are not geographically defined and that fostering them requires the perception of and intervention on the side of our “friends” against our “enemies.” (This latter shibbolethic opposition is derived from Leo Strauss, Carl Schmitt, and ultimately Plato’s Republic) (see Irving “grandfather of neoconservatism” Kristol’s description here.

William Safire knows that “neo-conservativism” cannot be reduced to particular strategic decisions. It is a political ideology defined by a certain understanding of the national interest and the broadest requirements for fostering that interest. But, this doesn’t stop him from caricaturing both Kerry’s position and neo-conservative ideology in order to salvage the debates as a supposed victory for Bush’s policies as voiced by Kerry.

His case rests on four claims:

> “What I want to do is change the dynamics on the ground,” Kerry volunteered. “And you have to do that by beginning to not back off of Falluja and other places and send the wrong message to terrorists. … You’ve got to show you’re serious.” Right on, John!

This, of course, confuses strategy and motivation. With 135,000 U.S. soldiers on the ground and the insurgency flowering, we might conclude that an offense is the best defense for our troops. This, of course, has little to do with ideology and much to do with strategy.

> Next, to grand strategy: Kerry was asked by Jim Lehrer, “What is your position on the whole concept of pre-emptive war?” In the past, Kerry has given a safe never-say-never response, but last week he gave a Strangelovian answer: “The president always has the right and always has had the right for pre-emptive strike.” He pledged never to cede “the right to pre-empt in any way necessary” to protect the U.S.

“Just war” theory has always allowed pre-emptive attacks based on “imminent threats.” The difference bettween Kerry and the neo-conservatives is over the question of whether a “gathering” threat or some other vaguely defined description of a supposed threat is grounds for preemption (such as “weapons program related activities”).

> On stopping North Korea’s nuclear buildup, Kerry abandoned his global-testing multilateralism; our newest neocon derided Bush’s six-nation talks and demands America go it gloriously alone.

This claim is a sort of false dichotomy: It is not the case that in order for Kerry to believe that multilateralism is generally preferable that he must eschew either bilateralism or even perhaps unilateralism. Safire assumes that if you reject unilateralism in the case of Iraq you must reject it always. This is an unreasonable assumption.

> And in embracing Wilsonian idealism to intervene in Darfur’s potential genocide, Kerry’s promise of troops outdid Pentagon liberators: “If it took American forces to some degree to coalesce the African Union, I’d be prepared to do it. …”

Once again, nothing strange in this. Being willing to assist in a multi-lateral humanitarian intervention does not make one a “neo-conservative” unless Safire is expanding the definition to include virtually every leader and politician in the world except Pat Buchanan.

Certainly there are analogies between the neo-conservative foreign policy seemingly ascendant in the Bush administration and some of Kerry’s positions. But that no more makes Kerry a “neo-conservative” than Bush’s reluctance to attack Iran would make him a convert to Gandhi’s pacifism. As Safire formulates the argument, it is laughably fallacious.

At best–and this is an act of interpretive charity that goes beyond his own expressed intentions–he might be understood to argue that Kerry has approached some neo-conservative positions. But, since Kerry was seemingly never opposed to those positions in themselves (only their inappropriateness under specific circumstances or the inept bungling of their implementation), there is nothing really interesting about these similarities.

Finally, we can note that a complete reading of the debate transcript shows that Kerry also accepts several strategic goals that are at direct odds to the policy formulated by the neo-conservatives and the Bush administration. Most importantly, he calls for the U.S. to commit itself to no long term presence in Iraq. Since part of the neo-conservative strategy has been to occupy Iraq at least in the 14 bases currently under construction, it is easy to see that for all of the similarity in Iraq policy, there is also significant dissimiliarity that Safire has conveniently ignored in order to make his case, a fallacy of “suppressed evidence.”

Op-Eds and other opinions

. . . or the terrorists win.

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Earlier this week (Source NYT 09/27/04), William Safire at the end of a long discussion of the terrorist kidnappings buried an interesting version of Krauthammer’s argument against Kerry’s foreign policy credentials. Unlike Krauthammer’s relatively transparent ad hominem fallacy, Safire’s deserves careful evaluation (Mouthpiece for the terrorists? and If it walks like a duck). It is a masterful blend of innuendo and nuanced accusation–far subtler than Krauthammer’s claim that the Kerry campaign is “saying the same thing” as the terrorists. Even more importantly, this argument has surfaced lately in a speech by the Vice President as a piece of the administration’s argument against Kerry’s foreign policy qualification.

Perhaps Safire was reading his Jean Baudrillard last weekend and decided to devote his column to the interesting way in which terrorism implicates the media in its very effects. As Baudrillard (among many others I am sure) argued years ago, terrorism is “spectacular.” Its primary effects occur not within the “real,” but rather within the “imaginary” or “symbolic.” These effects, however, can only stretch as far as the “events” can be communicated. Thus, the media becomes, whether wittingly or unwittingly, complicit in the very strategy of the terrorists. The media, of course, are caught in a double bind since they have an obligation to present the events.

Safire is content with the usual position on this difficult problem:

  • “Nobody should order reporters and editors to ‘downplay’ a gut-wrenching human interest story. . ..”
  • “But responsible journalists should consider the wisdom of allowing media-savvy terrorists to play them like a violin.”
  • “So do we have to become conduits for this grisly, real-death kidnap choreography? We are obliged to report it, but we need not go along with the terrorist propaganda in milking the most horror out of it.”

It’s safe to reject the obviously wrong alternatives: censorship or becoming the media arm of al Qaeda. But things are more complicated when we are not dealing with the media’s obligation to report, but with the political use of these kidnapping in the election.

>John Kerry, who has evidently decided to replace Howard Dean as the antiwar candidate, last weekend helped to magnify the terrorists’ kidnap weapon. In a scheduled commercial Kerry personally approved, just before charging that George Bush had no plan to get us out of Iraq, the Democratic campaign underscored the message Zarqawi has been sending: “Americans,” said Kerry’s announcer, “are being kidnapped, held hostage, even beheaded.”

>Though undoubtedly accurate, that paid evocation of horror by a political candidate is a terrible blunder. That’s the sort of emotional appeal you would expect from President Gloria Arroyo of the Philippines who pulled 51 troops out of Iraq, caving to the demand of kidnappers, emboldening them to grab fresh victims.

While the media may be obligated to present a sanitized and non-sensationalistic account of the kidnappings, the use of the same images in a campaign ad “magnif[ies] the terrorist kidnap weapon.” The accuracy of the ad is not contested, nor does Safire claim that it “sensationalizes” the facts, so instead he suggests that this use of the fact is a “terrible blunder.” (And we might do best to leave aside the slightly repellant taste of sexism lingering in the comparison of this statement of fact to the “emotional appeal” of President Arroyo, which I take to be a suggestion that Kerry is a woman.) What Safire needs here is a clear reason why it is wrong (or a “blunder”) for the Kerry campaign to state this fact but it is right for the media to report this fact.

>It’s bad enough for some thoughtless media outlets to become an echo chamber for scare propaganda; it’s worse when the nominee of a major party approves its use to press his antiwar candidacy.

>We are dealing with the most brutal propaganda weapon yet devised. Strong governments counter it by refusing to pay money or policy ransom to the kidnap-killers. Nonpartisan media’s response should be to report the events conscious of manipulation and not to overlook the reaction of Iraqi and worldwide Muslim disgust.

So Safire might argue that it isn’t the simple reporting of the facts in the ad, but the connection of these facts with the implicit conclusion–“therefore, we should withdraw,” or “therefore Bush has made mistakes.” It is their use as a means to Kerry’s political goal that is troubling for Safire. But, it is not at all clear why Safire thinks Kerry is not obligated or at least entitled to draw from these facts the prudential inference that it may not be in our interest to continue to occupy Iraq.

The only suggestion Safire makes is that this is the same thing as the terrorists want, and so in drawing this inference we are agreeing with the terrorists. Both my colleague and I have analyzed this equivocation in the Krauthammer’s earlier editorial. This argument at least as it stands is silly.

It is, at the same time, perplexingly seductive and disentangling precisely why is difficult. It seems to involve the presupposition: “accepting terrorist demands is in the long term against our interest.” If we negotiate with terrorists or accept their demands then we suggest to others that this tactic can be effective and this will then lead to more terrorism. Terrorists, thus, can only be fought. This further seems to imply, for many, that once a group adopts terrorist tactics their goals, whatever they may be, must be rejected as well. To agree to the goal is to condone the tactic. So even if it is in our interest to withdraw from Iraq, we cannot because this would be “letting the terrorists win.” We do not probably need the horror at Beslan to show us why this argument can lead to perverse results and thus to give us pause in accepting it. Too often it is used as part of a “false dichotomy” that suggests anything but attacking and fighting terrorists is capitulating. Certainly, this is how Safire is using the argument.

Ultimately, this argument is part of the ad hominem argument against Kerry’s fitness for the presidency: Kerry cannot be trusted because either he is so reckless as to put his own election efforts above the safety of the U.S., or because this reveals the willingness to capitulate to or even endorse the terrorist demands. Calling it an ad hominem argument is not to say that it is fallacious. If it were the case, or if Safire could provide reason to believe that Kerry is either complicit in the terrorist strategies against the U.S., or that he cynically uses tragedy (like say the 9/11 attack) to pursue his own political goals, then we would have good reason to question his fitness for the presidency. Ad hominem arguments are only fallacious when the claims about a person are not logically relevant to the conclusion being drawn from them.

I do not want to suggest that there is nothing in Safire’s concerns. There are certainly difficult questions involving the place and use of the media in times of war and especially terrorism. And there are also difficult and important questions about the character traits that each of our candidates possesses. But, in the final analysis it seems to me Safire stretches a legitimate question about terrorism and the media in order to make it serve his ad hominem argument against Kerry.

Charles Krauthammer

Mouthpiece for the terrorists?

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Kerry’s claims about his ability to garner the support of foreign leaders has engendered healthy skepticism and some unhealthy sneering. Whether Dick Cheney’s demand that Kerry reveal the names of the foreign leaders who would prefer to see change in the White House (not exactly a difficult list to guess at), or the general disbelief that Kerry will be able to persuade foreign nations to place their troops in the increasingly hell like conditions of Iraq, Kerry, remarkably, has managed to seem less convincing on the intuitively obvious criterion of being less disliked by the rest of the world than the incumbent. It boggles the mind that the Kerry campaign could need to run defense on this.

The need for this defense is, in part, the result of some of our most prominent pundits. Charles Krauthammer has added an interesting twist to these attacks on Kerry’s qualifications on foreign policy in today’s Washington Post [(Source: WaPo 09/24/04](http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A45794-2004Sep23?language=printer). In essence, Krauthammer argues that John Kerry is less able than President Bush to keep our friends and allies–that is, to pursue American interests abroad.

The occasion that prompts this concern is the upcoming election in the only country that has “joined the United States in the foxhole in every war in the past 100 years,” Australia.

> This is a critical election not only for Australia but also for the United States. Think of the effect on America, its front-line soldiers and its coalition partners if one of its closest allies turns tail and runs.

(We should note in passing that Australia’s 800 troops comprise about .2% of the forces on the ground, ranking beneath the Netherlands and the Ukraine.)

Nevertheless, bringing down the coalition by weakening Australia’s resolve is part of the terrorist plot:

> The terrorists are well aware of this potential effect. Everyone knows about the train bombings in Madrid that succeeded in bringing down a pro-American government and led to Spain’s precipitous withdrawal from Iraq. But few here noticed that this month’s car bombing in Jakarta, Indonesia, was designed to have precisely the same effect.

>The terrorists’ objective is to intimidate all countries allied with America. Make them bleed and tell them this is the price they pay for being a U.S. ally. The implication is obvious: Abandon America and buy your safety.

So far, there is little to question in the logic of Krauthammer’s representation of the intentions of some terrorists.

>That is what the terrorists are saying. Why is the Kerry campaign saying the same thing? “John Kerry’s campaign has warned Australians that the Howard Government’s support for the US in Iraq has made them a bigger target for international terrorists.” So reports the Weekend Australian (Sept. 18).

Kerry and the terrorists are speaking with one voice! The rhetorical effect of this move is stunning. Krauthammer is suggesting that Kerry’s message is in agreement with the terrorists. Before we can evaluate the rest of this argument we must ask, what does it mean to say that “the Kerry campaign is saying the same thing?”

First the terrorists are implicitly arguing:

1. Australia does not want to be the victim of terrorist attacks.
2. If Australia does not withdraw from Iraq we will attack them.
3. It is in Australia’s interest to withdraw from Iraq.

On the surface, this looks like an argument involving the appeal to fear or force. (It is not, I think, a logically fallacious argument on account of its “appeal to force.” The tricky thing about the fallacy “to the stick” (“This is true, or I will hit you with my stick”) is that sometimes force is not used to claim something is true, but only to sway the rational calculation of the listener. This does not necessarily make the argument fallacious. It may be immoral (or illegal) but not necessarily fallacious. More on this sometime later.) Nevertheless the terrorists are certainly making a threat.

But threats and reporting of threats are two different “speech acts.” If I tell you, “Do not cut across my neighbor’s property because he shoots trespassers,” it is obviously not “saying the same thing” as “do no cut across my property or I will shoot you.”

Krauthammer ignores or conceals the difference between these two “speech acts” in order to create the impression that Kerry and the terrorists agree, and that Kerry is somehow complicit in the threat that the terrorists are making. This is, as it stands, a fairly silly argument, and a transparent ad hominem fallacy resting on a fallacy of ambiguity.

It only becomes something to take seriously when we add some additional premises that show that when Kerry says this, he is being disloyal to our allies. When we make this additional inference we reach a nice clear ad hominem argument.

1. Kerry argues that Australia is less safe for its participation in the occupation of Iraq.
2. Kerry trivializes our allies’ “great political courage.”
3. It is disloyal to our allies to trivialize their sacrifice.
4. Therefore, Kerry is disloyal to our allies.

In fact, as this analysis shows, the first premise (and hence the first 3/4 of the editorial) is entirely spurious to the actual argument that Krauthammer is making (remove it and the argument stands such as it is). It has the effect of rhetorically preparing the ground for the attack on Kerry’s character through the conflation revealed above.

The justification of the second premise above is:

>[Kerry] calls these allies the “coalition of the coerced and the bribed.” This snide and reckless put-down more than undermines our best friends abroad. It demonstrates the cynicism of Kerry’s promise to broaden our coalition in Iraq. If this is how Kerry repays America’s closest allies — ridiculing the likes of Tony Blair and John Howard — who does he think is going to step up tomorrow to be America’s friend?

This would seem to be a question about the ultimate motivation of our coalition partners. When Kerry claims that they were “coerced and bribed” he suggests that they did not join the coalition virtuously, out of their abiding love of the U.S., but out of a more self-interested calculation. Or more importantly it is to say that the countries of the world did not, as perhaps they did in 1991, decide on independent grounds that this war was in both their individual and collective interest. Whether pointing this out is a mark of “disloyalty” is not immediately apparent.

What Krauthammer really needs to argue is that Kerry cannot strengthen the United States diplomatically. This would involve substantive argument that considers Kerry’s proposals, such as they are, and asks whether we will be more or less disliked by the rest of the world under Kerry’s proposals than under President Bush’s. In the last few sentences, Krauthammer considers this question.

>Kerry abuses America’s closest friends while courting those, like Germany and France, that have deliberately undermined America before, during and after the war. What lessons are leaders abroad to draw from this when President Kerry asks them — pretty please in his most mellifluous French — to put themselves on the line for the United States?

Leaving aside the abusive *ad hominem* aside (presumably Krauthammer thinks that speaking “mellifluous French” is some sort of character flaw–if so, I don’t want to be good), the argument comes down to the claim:

  • Foreign countries will not contribute to the rebuilding effort in Iraq under Kerry because they will see that he has snubbed other allies.

Whether this is true or not I cannot determine. But when all is said and done this is the limit of the substantive argument of Krauthammer’s editorial.

I would like to end by pointing to Jessica Matthews editorial in the Washington Post yesterday [Source: WaPo 09/23/04](http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A43383-2004Sep22.html) which contained three concrete proposals for changing our policy in Iraq that would plausibly address some of the motivations of the insurgents: a promise by the administration (backed-up by “transparent mechanism” not to profit from Iraqi oil; removal of the U.S. embassy from Baghdad and distancing of U.S. policy and the provisional government’s policy; pledge not to permanently base troops in Iraq and cessation of construction on the 14 bases currently planned.)

Op-Eds and other opinions

So your dog is your father?

Among the cacophony of accusations of flip-floppery there seems to be particular glee with the recollection of Kerry’s criticisms directed against Howard Dean in December of 2003.

Those who doubted whether Iraq or the world would be better off without Saddam Hussein, and those who believe today that we are not safer with his capture, don’t have the judgment to be president or the credibility to be elected president.

Charles Krauthammer last week claimed that this contradicts Kerry’s more recent pronouncement on the war:

Source (WaPo 09/16/04): Kerry is now back to the “wrong war in the wrong place at the wrong time,” a line lifted from Dean himself. So we are not better off with Hussein deposed after all.

Relational predicates have a funny logical structure. Failure to pay attention to this logical structure generates simple fallacies. Plato was probably the first to explore the absurdity of these fallacies in his dialogue the Euthydemus, which anyone interested in logical fallacies, or who just wants a quick philosophical laugh, should read. In that dialogue, Plato has a sophist advance the following argument.

Tell me, have you got a dog?–Yes, and a brute of one too, said Ctesippus.
And has he got puppies?–Yes indeed and they are just like him.
And so the dog is their father?–Yes I saw him mounting the bitch myself, he said.
Well then, isn’t the dog yours?–Certainly, he said.
Then since he is a father and he is yours, the dog turns out to be your father, and you are the brother of puppies, aren’t you.

This argument is more humorous than misleading and it is easy to detect the fallacy contained within it (though there are probably several ways of describing it). In a nutshell, the problem is that “father” is a relational property, or a “two place predicate.” One is always a father of some set of children (fatherhood in this sense is always a “causal relation”). Symbolically we might represent this as xF(a,b,c) reading “person (or animal) x is a Father of persons (or animals) a,b and c.” Thus from “your dog is a father of puppies,” we cannot conclude that “your dog is the father of you.” The fallacy works by substituting an “incomplete predicate” (your father) for a complete two term predicate (father of you), and in a sense concealing an equivocation.

This looks like what we find in the above example of supposed “flip-floppery,” only now the predicate is the comparative adjective “safer,” (or “better than”) which is also a two term predicate xSy (x is safer than y).

Those who doubted whether Iraq or the world would be better off without Saddam Hussein, and those who believe today that we are not safer with his capture, don’t have the judgment to be president or the credibility to be elected president.

This claim contains three comparative claims:

  1. Iraq is “better off” without Saddam Hussein than with him ruling.
  2. The world is “better off” without Saddam Hussein than with him ruling.
  3. We (the U.S.) are safer with Saddam Hussein captured than with him free in Iraq.

The question is whether Kerry’s recent claims contradict any of these comparative claims. There are several quotations that are claimed to do so.

Kerry is now back to the “wrong war in the wrong place at the wrong time,” a line lifted from Dean himself. So we are not better off with Hussein deposed after all.(Krauthammer, see quote above)

A good “translation” is one which preserves the sense of the original. More precisely, for our purposes, a good translation is one which is either logically identical with the original (“less safe” as a translation of “less secure”), or in which the translation is a reasonable and necessary implication of the original. Krauthammer claims that “the wrong war in the wrong place at the wrong time” can be translated as:

A. We were better off with Hussein in power than with him deposed.

We can simplify Kerry’s claim to:

A1. The invasion of Iraq was the wrong war.

To say that it was the wrong war is to say that it was not appropriate given the circumstances–that is, the ends of the war (disarming Saddam of WMD, disrupting the association of Saddam with al Qaida, deposing Saddam, or any of the other twenty or so justifications that have been advanced), did not justify the means–in some cases because the ends could not be achieved by these means (how can you disarm someone who is already disarmed?), and in some cases because the ultimate costs of the war are overcoming the benefit that the world has acquired through the removal of Saddam Hussein from power.

Kerry’s criticism of Dean, however, was that Dean (supposedly) suggested that the end was not desirable (whether he in fact did or not is now moot).

But, Kerry’s recent claim concerns the question of the right means to a desirable end, and not a claim that the end, deposing Saddam Hussein, was not desirable. Thus, the two claims are perfectly consistent, and the accusation of “flip-floppery” only seems plausible because Krauthammer creates a contradiction by misrepresenting the meaning of Kerry’s words.

A more plausible case for flip-floppery can be made on the basis of Kerry’s claim most recently at his NYU speech on Monday:

Saddam Hussein was a brutal dictator who deserves his own special place in hell. But that was not, in itself, a reason to go to war. The satisfaction we take in his downfall does not hide this fact: we have traded a dictator for a chaos that has left America less secure. Source (Kerry Campaign 09/20/04).

David Brooks was first out of the gate with his response to Kerry’s speech in yesterday’s New York Times (Source (NYT, 09/21/04). Again we find the charge of flip-floppery.

The president’s case is that the world is safer with Saddam out of power, and that we should stay as long as it takes to help Iraqis move to democracy. Kerry’s case is that the world would be safer if we’d left Saddam [in power.]

In the speech above, Kerry actually makes a claim about the relative security of our current situation and the pre-war situation (unlike in the manufactered example above). Thus, the translation of

“we have traded a dictator for a chaos that has left America less secure”

into

“Kerry’s case is that the world would be safer if we’d left Saddam in power.”

seems at least plausible.

Nonetheless we should be careful. Kerry’s sentence from the NYU speech seems to mean that “we are less secure with the present chaos than we were with Saddam Hussein in power.” Certainly this does not contradict statement 3 above (which when accurately read only compares our safefy in regards to Saddam being free and Saddam captured). But perhaps it contradicts statement 2: The world is “better off” without Saddam Hussein ruling than with him ruling.

As Kerry makes clear in the passage quoted, he is not saying that the “world is not better off with Saddam Hussein deposed than with him in power.” Instead he seems to be claiming that the consequence of a policy that may have made the world “better off” has now made us less secure. This is not an outlandish claim having been advanced by numerous policy experts both inside and outside our government. But its truth is beside the point right now: What is important for my purpose is that it does not, in fact, contradict his original claims.

To say that the world is “better off” with Saddam deposed is perfectly consistent with saying that as a result of this improvement in the general condition of the world “we” (Americans?) are “less secure” than we were when Saddam was in power. An example:

  • I am better off being fit than not being fit.
  • I am more tired having exercised than if I had not exercised.

There is no “flip-flop” if I make these claims: Attaining a desirable goal by means that cause other undesirable consequences involves no logical contradiction. This is obscured by the tendency of the op-ed writers to translate Kerry’s words in terms of not fully specified relational predicates.

It is much easier to find a contradiction between between my two claims above if I render the first as, “I am better off being fit” (concealing the relationality of the predicate) and if I translate the other by “I am not better off being fit” (misconstrue the obvious sense of my sentence). These two transformations generate a seeming “flip-flop” where none necessarily exists.

Once again, I am not claiming that John Kerry does not “flip flop.” All I would claim is that these cases of supposed flip-floppery do not bear up under careful scrutiny.

Robert Kagan, William Kristol

Jumping on the flip-floppery bandwagon

As the accusations of flip-floppery reach crescendo in the op-ed pages of our major dailies and weeklies, it is appropriate to consider the underlying logic of this accusation. Virtually all of the prominent conservative pundits have devoted a column or two to demonstrating Kerry’s flip-floppery, but their details are essentially the same. Last week there were two columns that stand out: Krauthammer’s editorial in the Washington Post and the Weekly Standard’s Kagan and Kristol’s (the latter seems to be writing nothing but flip-flop columns) co-authored editorial.

What the pundits are trying to demonstrate is that John Kerry has changed his position on Iraq. Now this by itself would not suggest anything. All politicians presumably should change their positions when circumstances demand it, or when they discover their previous position to have been mistaken. For example, George Bush argued that the military should not be in the business of “nation building” during the 2000 election. After 9/11, of course, he saw that his previous view was mistaken and has chosen to engage in acts of nation-building in Afghanistan and Iraq. Yet none of these pundits see fit to accuse Bush of “flip-floppery.” Surely something more than change is at stake here. And given the course of the war over the last three years (including planning and build-up), one would think it could be a virtue to be able to change one’s assessment in response to the changing “facts on the ground.”

The real accusation that the pundits are striving to make is that Kerry changes his position for the wrong reasons. This is an old accusation trundled out against “liberals” every four years. In essence, it claims that liberals change their positions for matters of mere political expediency and therefore cannot be trusted to do what they think is right. The implicit conclusion is that we cannot trust John Kerry to be President. As such it is an ad hominem argument.

It is, however, important to keep in mind that not all ad hominem arguments are fallacious. Often a person’s character or past is relevant to our inferences concerning that person. It only becomes fallacious if the claim about Kerry’s character is irrelevant to the conclusion about trustworthiness.

For example, although the argument would be ad hominem, the following would not be fallacious:

John Kerry uses political power to enrich his friends and family at the expense of the state. Therefore, John Kerry cannot be trusted with the office of president.

Certainly the premise of the argument attacks Kerry’s character, but because this characteristic is relevant to trustworthiness the argument is not seemingly fallacious.

So we can never conclude simply because an argument is an “attack” on a candidate that it is fallacious. If, as people often say, the public does not like “negative attack ads,” this is not necessarily a sign of their virtue. The relevant difference lies between fallacious and unsound attacks ads and valid and sound attacks.

In general, it seems plausible that flip-floppery, of the kind with which Kerry is accused, is potentially relevant to his trustworthiness.

But this is not the end of the story. First of all we must determine how we can recognize flip-flopping when it occurs. Let’s look at two putative examples.

  1. Source (WkSt. 9/7/04):

    Wiliam Kristol, who has seemingly become a full time flip-flop detector, finds the following “flip-flop” (though he does not call it by this name).

    2. JOHN KERRY said yesterday that Iraq was “the wrong war in the wrong place at the wrong time.” Translation: We would be better off if Saddam Hussein were still in power.

    Dean also said, “The difficulties and tragedies we have faced in Iraq show the administration launched the war in the wrong way, at the wrong time, with inadequate planning, insufficient help, and at the extraordinary cost, so far, of $166 billion.”

    But who challenged Dean immediately? John Kerry. On December 16, at Drake University in Iowa, Kerry asserted that “those who doubted whether Iraq or the world would be better off without Saddam Hussein, and those who believe today that we are not safer with his capture, don’t have the judgment to be president or the credibility to be elected president.”

    The first quote contains an obvious “straw man”–a deliberate misconstrual in order to generate the contradiction with the last quote.

    “The wrong war in the wrong place at the wrong time.” would be contradicted by claim such as that it is the “right war” or the “wrong war in the right place” or the “wrong war in the wrong place at the right time.” But, Kristol wants a flip-flop at any cost. So he “translates Kerry’s words into the claim that “we would be better off if Saddam Hussein were still in power.”

    The claim might be translated into the claim that “it was not worth the cost to the U.S. to remove Saddam Hussein from power.” But unfortunately if Kerry intended this, he would be perfectly consistent with his earlier claim. The Dean quote makes it quite clear that Kerry probably means this.

    But, Kristol does not let problems like journalistic accuracy thwart him in his pursuit of a flip-flop. In the last quote, Kerry only claims that those who think that capturing or removing Saddam from power does not make us safer are unfit for the presidency.

    To put the relationship between these various quotes clearly. The last quote speaks about an end, the former two question the means to that end. There is no inconsistency and thus no “flip-flop.”

  2. Source (WaPo 09/17/04):

    3. alls Iraq “the wrong war in the wrong place at the wrong time. But, of course, he voted to authorize the war. And shortly after the fall of Baghdad he emphatically repeated his approval of the war: “It was the right decision to disarm Saddam Hussein. And when the president made the decision, I supported him.”

    Of course, the center piece of all the accusations of flip-flopping on Iraq is the perceived contradiction between Kerry’s “vote for the war in 2002 and his recent criticisms of the war. Once again the contradiction between the two takes a little editing work to generate, and rests ultimately on the obfuscation of the relevant aspects of our system of government. With a simple conception of decision making in Washington abetted by a media that is unwilling to instuct its viewers on the nature of our government, it seems to many that Kerry has changed his mind on the Iraq war. The very terms in which the media portrays the vote to authorize the President to use force as a “vote for the war” obscures the basic facts of our government.

    Here is John Kerry in 1991 speaking about the vote to authorize the first George Bush’s first Gulf war.

    75 percent or more of those who will vote for the use of force do not want it to be used, and a significant number will vote for it only becuase they want to prevent the president from being reversed.” (quote from Eric Alterman’s Sound and Fury

    Before both wars, in fact, the Presidents Bush and Bush asked for the authority to use force in order to be able to avoid using force. Here’s George Bush the younger on the vote:

    Q Mr. President, how important is it that that resolution give you an authorization of the use of force?

    BUSH: That will be part of the resolution, the authorization to use force. If you want to keep the peace, you’ve got to have the authorization to use force. But it’s — this will be — this is a chance for Congress to indicate support. It’s a chance for Congress to say, we support the administration’s ability to keep the peace. That’s what this is all about. Source (Al Franken’s Blog)

    So, according to Bush in 2002 Kerry’s vote for authorization of the president to use force, was not a “vote for the war” as the pundits claim, it was a vote in support of the “administration’s ability to keep the peace.”

    But once again, if John Kerry was not endorsing an invasion of Iraq, never mind an invasion that lacked any clear strategy for the occupation, then there is no necessary contradiction between his later claim that “it was the wrong war in the wrong place at the wrong time.” These statements are seemingly consistent.

    And as apparently Kerry said at the time (once again from Franken’s blog):

    Let me be clear, the vote I will give to the President is for one reason and one reason only: To disarm Iraq of weapons of mass destruction, if we cannot accomplish that objective through new, tough weapons inspections in joint concert with our allies.

Identifying “flip-flops” takes logic: At the root of the question is the identification of contradictory and contrary claims. The real challenge faced by the pundits, however, is obscuring the lack of a contradiction and generating a seeming contradiction, by either deliberately misconstruing the meaning (Kristol and Krauthammer above) or by taking comments out of their context. These pundits know that they must obscure context and intention, never mind nuance, if they are to make the charge of “flip-floppery” stick. We can see that in the first example from William Kristol. There he goes so far as to replace without explanation or justification Kerry’s own words with a straw man translation that allows Kristol to claim “flip-floppery.”

This is not to say that Kerry hasn’t “flip-flopped,” or perhaps better that he hasn’t changed his mind on the issues. There are other examples in Krauthammer’s, and Kristol’s and Kagan’s editorials. Whether these are plausible accusations of “flip-floppery,” or accusations contrived in the author’s enthusiasm to jump on the “flip-flop” bandwagon and at the expense of the rules of logic, I will leave for the reader to consider.

Op-Eds and other opinions

When an explanation is actually an argument

Addenda 09/18/04 (see post on 09/17/04): O.K. Thinking more about this. It seems that it is important to distinguish between an explanandum (the thing being explained) that is false and one that is unknown. If it is unknown the explanation can be constructed entirely in the hypothetical. If it is false it is not an explanation. But, if the explanandum is unknown then our explanation seems collapse into an argument. If in any explanation the explanandum is more known than the explanans, then to explain something unknown to be true by facts presumably known to be true (or supported with reasons) makes the explanation into an argument. So Krauthammer is either offering no explanation or an argument.

Here’s a parallel construction.

If game seven of the world series were held today, the Cubs would win by 7-10 runs. Why? Because. . ..

This claim is probably false, but imagine that it is unknown. My explanation for it would in fact be an argument since it would provide reasons to believe that the Cubs would win by 7-10 runs.

So perhaps, I should have evaluated Krauthammer’s piece as an argument that Kerry would lose by 88-120 electoral votes. If that’s the conclusion then I may have been too charitable here, since there seems little reason to believe that Kerry’s flip-floppery can in any way predict the number of states that will go to Bush, or even predict the outcome of the election. If Kerry loses the election it will probably be for a host of reasons from voter turn-out, to events in Iraq, to the economy, to the debates. Historians will debate the electoral outcomes for a long time.

Nonetheless, whether premise 1 below is true or false is a question that does not concern us here. Assuming that these premises are true, and if we narrow Krauthammer’s conclusion to the claim George Bush will win the election (with the specificity of his electoral prediction undestood as hand-waving), then the conclusion would seem to follow.

  1. The election will be decided on the relative credibility of the candidates’ Iraq policy
  2. Flip-floppery on Iraq has made Kerry uncredible on this question
  3. President Bush has credibility on this questions.
  4. Therefore, President Bush will win the election.

Once again, however, the argument will be seen to rest on the accusation of flip-floppery and the claim that this makes Kerry uncredible on Iraq. We will have to return to the arguments presented on this point at later time.

And on the subject of polling and its reliability, see the recent scandal with Gallup polls. In a nutshell, Gallup has been predicting a 40% turnout of registered Republicans and a 33% turnout of registered Democrats in its polls. Without knowing the reasons for this, it is hard to evaluate it, but at the least, it should give pause to anyone who thinks that polling is somehow an objective measure of reality, rather than a construction of that reality.

Op-Eds and other opinions

When an explanation is not an explanation

Source (WaPo 09/16/04): The full court press is on: Virtually every day the editorial pages are hammering home the accusation of “flip-floppery.” It is looking like this, more than anything else, will define the presidential campaign this year. Most conservative columnists seem to be splitting their time equally between the accusation of flip-floppery, castigation of CBS, and discrediting of Kitty Kelly’s unflattering gossip about the Bush family.

An adequate logical analysis of these accusations of “flip-floppery” exceeds the space we have here. There are a number of questions that need to be answered in order to understand and evaluate the meaning of, the evidence for, and the validity of the implicit arguments based on this accusation: What is a flip-flop? When is a change a flip-flop? What is the argument in each instance of putative flip-flopping? Is flip-flopping bad? Are the arguments constructed on the basis of this accusation fallacious or unfallacious ad hominem arguments? Perhaps over the next six weeks we will be able to clarify some of this, but for now the focus must be narrower.

Margins of error rarely stop pundits from drawing conclusions from polling data. The transformation of subtlety, nuance, ambiguity, and probability into simple certain opinions is the modus operandi of the many of the more ideological pundits. The political value of certainty, whether expressed by our leaders or our pundits, is being demonstrated once again in this election season.

In today’s Washington Post, Charles Krauthammer takes it upon himself to explain Bush’s lead in the polls by John Kerry’s flip-floppery.

If the election were held today, John Kerry would lose by between 88 and 120 electoral votes.”

To be fair to Krauthammer this kind of prediction is quite common and even perhaps useful with significant qualifications (see electoral vote predictor). Nonetheless it is profoundly misleading in this context. Currently 74 electoral votes for Bush and 42 for Kerry are within the margin of error of all polls (<2-3% difference for the most part). This might still leave Bush with 60-70 point spread, but only on the condition that the election involved the disenfranchisement of around a quarter of the country, that is, with leaving 136 electoral votes uncounted.

To put it bluntly, we simply do not know who would win these states if the election were held today and any claim to know on the basis of current polling involves fallacious reasoning: In this case, probably a fallacy of hasty conclusion. It may, in fact, be that the conclusion is true (If the election were held today. . ..), but the polling data on which this conclusion implicitly relies is not an adequate justification that the conclusion is true, or in this case, even that it is more probable than not.

The volatility of the poll numbers does not chasten Krauthammer. If Krauthammer had written this column a week ago, he might have written: “If the election were held today, John Kerry would lose by 2 electoral votes.” (source). Has Kerry significantly changed his strategy or his positions in the last seven days? Is there any plausible explanation for this wild oscillation in the poll numbers, except a fundamental and inherent uncertainty of political polling? Or perhaps right after the Demmocratic convention he would have written: “If the election were held today, John Kerry would win by 57 electoral votes (source).

Predictions based on statistical differences within the margin of error of the sample cannot reliably be used to draw the conclusion that Krauthammer wishes.

Now this is only the first sentence of Krauthammer’s editorial. Krauthammer wants to explain this supposed electoral victory by Kerry’s flip-floppery.

Explanations proceed from a well-established fact and provide an account of its causes. Thus, they also involve arguments which proceed from well-established premises and argue to a conclusion. In the case of explanations they argue to the conclusion that the explanation is, at least plausible, and ideally the best one available. But if the fact that is being explained is not a fact, then there is nothing to explain and the the project of explaining becomes fatuous, even if the facts that provide the explanation are completely true!

By definition an argument with a false conclusion and true premises, however, is invalid.

  1. Bush’s central vulnerability is the war in Iraq.
  2. Kerry cannot credibly speak on Iraq, because of his flip-floppery.
    • Various contradictions in his speeches on the subjects.
  3. John Kerry would lose the election, if it were held today.
    • recent polling data from the various states.
  4. Therefore, Kerry’s flip-floppery is the reason for (best explanation of/cause of) his current losing of the election.
Op-Eds and other opinions

There are two kinds of people. . .

Source (NYT 09/14/04): David Brooks certainly likes his dichotomies: Just this Saturday he was busy dividing people into
“spreadsheet-people” and “paragraph-people.” This sort of dichotomous thinking runs a particular risk
of logical fallacy, the fallacy of false dilemma: Roughly, this is the fallacy of “black and white”
thinking. That is, a conclusion is justified by claiming that there are two alternatives and then ruling one of them
out for some reason. Formally this is a valid argument. But, if the disjunctive premise (either a or b) ignores other alternatives (c,d,e etc.), then the argument may commit the fallacy of “false dilemma.”

Once again, in Brooks’ editorial, we find a dichotomy complete with handy tag-names: gradualists and confrontationalists.

The debate on how to proceed in Iraq is not between the hawks and the doves: it’s within the hawk
community, and it’s between the gradualists and the confrontationalists.

Now this looks, at first blush, like a false dilemma. Surely there are other positions in this debate. What about those
doves? Certainly for those who read progressive and liberal media (Nation, Progressive et al.) there are more than
Brooks’ two positions.

But when we pay careful attention to Brooks’ premise we notice that he limits it to positions that are actively
taking part in the “debate on how to proceed in Iraq.” With charity we might claim that Brooks is speaking of the policy
circles in Washington, for whom negotiation, retreat, or abandonment are not politically viable alternatives. Many
might wish that there was a candidate who could put forward a determinate plan for disengagement with the insurgents,
but Brooks can charitably be said to be on plausible grounds if he is describing the debate within the policy establishment.

But now his argument takes a curious turn. Rather than arguing against one alternative and then inferring that the
other is preferable, he offers refutations of both alternatives.

First the confrontationalist.

The gradualists argue that it would be crazy to rush into terrorist-controlled cities and try to clean them
out with massive force because the initial attack would be so bloody there’d be a debilitating political backlash.

Then the gradualist:

The confrontationalists can’t believe the Bush folks, of all people, are waging a sensitive war on terror.
By moving so slowly, the U.S. is allowing terror armies to thrive and grow. With U.S. acquiescence, fascists are
allowed to preen, terrorize and entrench themselves.

  1. Either gradualist approach is best or confrontationalist is best.
  2. The confrontationalist approach is not best, because it will foster the resistance it is meant to remove.
  3. The gradualist approach is not best, because it will allows the resistance to grow and strengthen.
  4. Therefore, ?

But where does this leave Brooks? What conclusion can we infer from a disjunctive both of whose disjuncts are false.
Brooks seems at a loss at this point. His conclusion is half-hearted and tepid:

It’s depressing to realize how strong the case against each option is. But the weight of the argument is on
the gradualist side. That’s mostly because people like Ayad Allawi deserve a chance to succeed. These people in the
interim government are scorned as stooges and U.S. puppets, but they’re risking and sometimes giving their lives for
their country. Let’s take the time to give them a shot.

The deciding factor on the military and political strategy in Iraq for Brooks, is not the number of American casualties. It is not
the cost of the war, nor the geopolitical-political instability that it is causing. It is not the calculation that eventually we will be able to withdraw honorably if we can just stick it out. No. It is that the interim government is really trying.

This argument might make perfect sense at a little league game as a reason to offer the coach when he is ready to pull your son after his third or fourth error. But it defies imagination that it could be seriously offered as a reason to decide our foreign policy.

Now while I applaud Brooks’ clear formulation of the arguments against both the gradualist and the confrontationalist approaches, what undermines this achievement is the conclusion that he draws from his analysis.

It seems to me that Brooks’ conclusion should be re-formulated as:

A. Since there is no good choice, and we must choose one of the two, trivial reasons (Allawi is really trying) can decide the matter. This is roughly to say “flip a coin.”

But notice that he has moved from:

  1. There are only two positions within the policy debate.
  2. There are no other positions than the two within the policy debate.

Although at first, it appears that Brooks does not commit the fallacy, in order to conclude what he concludes he must strengthen his initial premise, which was merely factual at first (there are only two positions in the policy debate) to an evaluative claim (there are only two viable positions in the policy debate). When he does this he commits the fallacy of false dilemma.

Interestingly this could probably also be described as committing the fallacy of ignoratio elenchi, of missing the point. This is a fallacy of relevance, in this case the relevance of the conclusion. It occurs when a set of premises justifies one conclusion, but the arguer replaces that conclusion with a tenuously related conclusion instead.

Brooks’ argument should naturally be taken as a sort of reductio ad absurdum of the fact that there are only two inadequate alternatives being discussed by the Bush administration, and therefore, an argument for the inclusion of other alternatives.

Brooks sidesteps the natural implication of his arguments by invoking the entirely spurious argument about Allawi’s government. I’m at a loss to describe this move. Perhaps it is a sort of red herring–the fallacy of diverting the readers attention from the natural conclusion of the argument (the policy debates within the Bush administration are dangerously narrow) to another conclusion (the Bush administration is right to pursue a gradualist approach), by the introduction of a spurious consideration.

To be fair, perhaps Brooks could defend the exclusion of all other alternatives other than his dichotomy. Perhaps, an argument could be made that retreat, abandonment, gradual withdrawal, negotiation, power-sharing, U.N.-ification, etc.. are all impossible alternatives. Perhaps it could be argued. But Brooks certainly does not do so and so is not entitled to his conclusion.

Op-Eds and other opinions

Generalizing from Novak’s Hurt Feelings

Source: (ChST 09/09/04): Robert Novak argued last week that the protesters at the Republican National Convention “represented[ed] a disturbing new development in the nation’s politics: hatred in the streets.”

His justification of this claim is worth considering. It takes three forms:

  1. Anecdotal Evidence

    2. Tim Carney, a reporter for this column, got a taste of that last Thursday night as he left the Garden. He was wearing a three-piece suit and presumably was mistaken for a delegate by a young woman, who yelled at him: ”Get out of New York!” She added to Carney, a native New Yorker: ”You don’t belong here!”

    Individual marchers singled out any person they thought might be a convention delegate, firing off angry, often obscene, denunciations. The streets of Manhattan were not pleasant for anyone foolish enough to wander around wearing a convention badge.

  2. Generalizations:

    3. The organized demonstrations were purely negative, attacking George W. Bush with scant expression of support for John Kerry.

    The irrational loathing expressed daily on the Internet by passionate, though poorly informed, bloggers was transferred into the streets.

    This last quote is an interesting unsupported generalization (about bloggers) used in support of another generalization (about the protesters).

  3. Personal Experience:

    4. Unfortunately, many demonstrators recognized me from my television appearances and condemned me as a ”traitor” because of the CIA leak case, some suggesting I should kill myself.

I cannot, of course, offer substantive comment on the truth or falsity of Novak’s characterizations of the protesters: we might, however, note that the 500,000 protesters who assembled to march on Sunday cannot with any plausibility be identified with the much smaller group of more militant protesters who used strategic harassment of delegates to convey their disagreement with the platform of the Republican party. This somewhat wild generalization seems to lack plausibility. One might imagine any number of other similar generalizations that would be regarded as obviously false–such as from the number of Saudi Arabian Nationals involved in the September 11th hijackings to a characterization of Saudi Arabian National in general. Or from the probably illegal and perhaps treasonous leaking of a C.I.A. operative’s identity by a Republican to a characterization of all Republicans as treasonous–though we might note that Ann Coulter has made a similar generalization about Democrats in her screed Treason.

Nor do I wish to contest the truth of the anecdotal reports which I am sure could be multiplied many times over and which seem to be plausible given the evidence of other reporting on the protesters.

What I would want to contest, however, is Novak’s inference to the presence of a radically new form of politics which he calls “hatred in the streets.” Above all, Novak is trying to discredit the protest movement by distinguishing it from the protests in 1968, which Novak surprisingly finds respectable. In 1968, the protests, Novak argues, had a determinate political goal. In 2004, the protests are nothing more than “hatred in the streets.” This argument relies on the implausible generalization uncovered above which is based on some particular protesters’ tactics to the a characterization of the motivations of 500,000 other protesters.

In fact, I am sure that Novak did encounter “hatred in the streets.” If, as he says, “many demonstrators recognized” him, I suspect that the hatred against someone who has been plausibly accused of knowlingly betraying his government, and at least accused of unknowingly doing so, was quite present and palpable. Whether or not that is to be blamed on the protesters, on Novak’s scandalous column, or on high-ranking members of the Bush administration, remains seemingly for Fitzgerald and a Grand Jury to decide. But nonetheless, as a matter of logic, Novak is not entitled to generalize from these particular instances of hatred directed towards him (and other isolated cases) to the 500,000 protesters who assembled to show their disagreement with the current administration’s policies.

General discussion

1000 dead, ergo. . ..

1 Comment

Source (NYT 09/10/04): It is a lot easier to find logical fallacies in arguments with which you disagree. For the thoughtful reader, disagreement prompts reflection concerning the ground of the disagreement. If, however, I believe deeply that Dick Cheney is right when he claims that electing John Kerry will make us more vulnerable to attack, then my agreement will in all likelihod obscure the fallacies in his implicit argument.

There are many candidates in the op-ed pages of the last few days for analysis and criticism–Novak’s false generalizations about the 500,000 protestors in New York on the basis of a few particular encounters (yesterday in the Chicago Sun Times Source (ChST 09/09/04)), or Krauthammer’s mis-characterizations of the arguments and positions of the Kerry campaign (straw man fallacies) in the Washington Post (Source(WaPo 09/10/04). In a departure from previous form, I want to analyze an argument with which I agree entirely. In a palpably emotional reponse to the NYT’s honouring of the 1000 men and women who have had their lives ended by the conflict in Iraq–and if you have not scrolled through this wracking testimony stop reading and follow this link (Roster of the Dead.) –Herbert asks:

How many thousands more will have to die before we acknowledge that President Bush’s obsession with Iraq and Saddam Hussein has been a catastrophe for the United States?

The question is so serious and necessary that I am, at first, perplexed by the task I have set myself–to analyze the logic of his argument.

His answer to the question is not a precise number, of course, but takes the form of a confirmation of the premise of the question:

At some point, as in Vietnam, the American public will balk at the continued carnage, and this tragic misadventure will become politically unsustainable.

This is the conclusion that Herbert is arguing for. What reasons does he advance for the conclusion?

  1. There is no persuasive goal for this war.

    2. The Americans are not at all clear what they’re fighting for. Saddam is gone. There were no weapons of mass destruction. The link between Saddam and the atrocities of Sept. 11 was always specious and has been proven so.

    and

    You can wave goodbye to the naive idea that democracy would take root in Iraq and then spread like the flowers of spring throughout the Middle East. That was never going to happen

  2. There is no adequate means for winning the war.

    3. And our Iraqi “allies” will never fight their Iraqi brethren with the kind of intensity the U.S. would like, any more than the South Vietnamese would fight their fellow Vietnamese with the fury and the effectiveness demanded by the hawks in the Johnson administration.

    and

    The Iraqi insurgents–whether one agrees with them or not–believe that they are fighting for their homeland, their religion and their families.

    and

    We won’t–and shoudln’t–wage total war in Iraq either. But to the insurgents, the Americans epitomize eveil. . .For them, this is total war.

  3. The cost will eventually be too high for the American people.

    4. There is undoubtedly an unspoken premise here:

  4. The American people will balk at continued carnage, if they perceive the war to pointless, unwinable, and too costly.
  5. Therefore, the American people will (eventually) make this war politically unsustainable.

That I take it is his argument, and as it stands it seems entirely valid. Of course, the truth of the premises could be questioned if our concern was with the soundness of the argument rather than its validity. The premises have not been entirely justifed. His claim about the unlikelihood of democracy arising in the Iraq would certainly be contested and then would need further justification. But we cannot fault him for having premises that need further justification, since all arguments must begin provisionally from premises.

I want to ask now about the presence or absence of two fallacies in his editorial: an appeal to pity and an ad hominem argument.

Appeal to Pity: There will be some I suspect who will try to tarnish the NYT for printing this Roster of the Dead. As Ted Koppel’s Nightline found out months ago, the motives of this memorial will be viewed cynically as a form of manipulation. These critics will argue that the purpose of showing the roster of the dead is to trade on the public’s emotions in order to lead them to the conclusion that the war is not worth the cost. By ratcheting up the publics perception of the real human cost (or at least, the cost for Americans, since a “Roster of the Civilian Dead” would fill a day or more of the NYT) the public will be led to conclude that the war is not worth the price. Of course, the emotions that this Roster of the Dead provoke include at least sadness, pity, and respect. Thus, it might seem to be an implicit argumentum ad misericordiam, or the fallacy of an appeal to pity.

Herbert interrupts his argument three times with a line of four names and nothing more. The question is thus, what is the function of this rhetorical gesture and is it implicitly fallacious?

An argument by appeal to pity is an argument that claims that something is true by evoking an irrelevent emotional experience of pity that makes the listener willing to grant the truth of the claim without justification or reason. The traditional example given in virtually all logic textbooks is: “I deserve an A because if I don’t get an A I won’t get into Law School.” Although the reason might be a motivation for giving an A, it is not a reason for deserving an A. This is where it gets tricky. An appeal to pity only occurs when the appeal is irrelevant for justifying the conclusion.

Herbert’s rhetorical use of the soldiers’ names, however, is directly relevant to his argument: the cost of the war in Iraq is already too high. To judge the truth of this requires that we have a clear sense of what that cost is. The pages of photographs, although it will never convey the real loss experienced in each and every one of the 1000 dead, strives, however failingly, to evoke a sense of its magnitude.

Ad Hominem:

They were sent by a president who ran and hid when he was a young man and his country was at war.

This one sentence stands out in the editorial: It rings of an ad hominem fallacy. An ad hominem fallacy occurs when one argues for a conclusion based on an irrelevant fact about a person who maintains an opposing view. Not all arguments that rest on premises about a person’s character are, however, fallacious. Often character is relevant to the inference that is being made, and even if the character is represented unflatteringly it does not make the argument fallacious.

Once again it is a question of relevance: Is George Bush’s avoidance of risk during the Vietnam war relevant to an assessment of his qualifications for ordering soldiers to their deaths or relevant to the justification of the war?

This is a profoundly difficult question, and one which I suspect those who have served in the military might answer differently than those of us who have not. Given the way the campaign is shaping up, however, we will have ample opportunity to address this question in the future.

In place of that here, I would point out only the following: This sentence does no logical work here and assuming it is true, it would not provide reason to disagree with Bush’s policies and decisions. I don’t think, however, that Herbert intends it to provide such reason, though, in fact, I am not sure what it contributes to his argument.

Arguments, if they are to succeed in persuading, are directed towards those who either disagree or who have not made up their minds. Sometimes even the hint of a fallacy, however, can detract from the persuasiveness of an argument. Just as a fallacy can induce people to accept a conclusion that is not justified, so the appearance of a fallacy can induce people to reject a conclusion that has been justified.