Stardate 20030228.1521

(On Screen): A little bit of knowledge can be a dangerous thing. Ed sends me a link to an article which attempts to explain all the ways in which the Bush administration is using fallacious argument techniques to put one over on the American people about the necessity for war in Iraq. Evidently the author managed to stumble on one of the web pages describing such approaches, such as this or this or this or this or this or this.

And study them well he did, for even as he is trying to point out fallacies in Bush's reasoning, he himself proceeds to commit his own. For instance:

One of the favorite methods of the current administration is a false dilemma. This is when only two choices are given when, in reality, there are more options. Right after 9/11 you heard, “You are either with us or against us,” in the fight against terrorism. Actually, countries can be both against terrorism and not an ally of the U.S. More recently, many countries are showing that they are both against a pre-emptive war and against the current Iraqi regime.

One of the favorite methods employed by anti-war activists is the "straw man". This is where you deliberately misrepresent the position held by your opposition, and instead create a caricature of it, or simply lie about it. Bush never said "you are either with us or against us". The implication of this is that anyone who doesn't formally declare support would be treated as an enemy, but that's not what he was trying to communicate.

What he said was "You are either with us or with the terrorists." That may seem a subtle difference, but what he was trying to say was that neutrality wasn't a practical choice. Anyone who refused to become active against terrorism was effectively aiding it through benign neglect, and could become a victim of it. And last year we saw that graphically demonstrated in Indonesia. After months of pressure, where the Indonesian government steadfastly refused to acknowledge that there were any extremist groups in their nation or any threat of an attack there, a bomb was detonated in Bali by a local Muslim extremist group. Only after that did the government there get busy with the job of closing the barn doors, the horses having already fled.

What Bush was trying to say was that no one can pretend that "it can't happen here".

Another arguing device is the argument from ignorance. This involves claiming that what hasn’t been disproven must be true. We hear Iraq hasn’t shown that they do not have WMD, therefore they do. The real burden of proof is on the party making the claim. The U.S. and/or U.N. must prove that Iraq has WMD. It is impossible for Iraq to prove that they don’t.

First off, there is evidence from open sources that there were still such weapons and materials which had not been destroyed at the time that the inspectors left in 1998. Second, it is ironic that it is he who is actually using the argument from ignorance, for what he's saying is that if we can't prove there are no WMDs in Iraq that we have to act as if they don't exist.

He's also trying to incorrectly extrapolate the rules we use in criminal trials to the international scene where they don't make sense. "Innocent until proven guilty" is not a principle which applies to diplomacy, because proof is too hard to come by. More important, even if that evidence exists, most of it can't be publicly revealed without compromising sensitive intelligence sources.

We have to operate on the basis of probabilities and risks. If there's any substantial chance that Iraq continues to have such WMDs, we have to act as if they do exist. The risks associated with a false negative are much greater than for a false positive.

An argument portraying a series of increasingly bad events is called a slippery slope. This is used effectively by gun-control opponents who suggest handgun registration will eventually lead to government confiscation of all guns. On Iraq, we hear how Saddam will develop WMDs and give them to terrorists who will then use them on America. While this is one possible chain of events, it hardly justifies a pre-emptive attack on a sovereign nation.

The response to this has been that the proof or smoking gun can’t be in the form of a mushroom cloud over an American city. This is more slippery slope with a false dilemma and a whole lot of fear-mongering. There are effective ways to find proof of WMD and destroy them before it comes to such a dramatic conclusion.

The "slippery slope" argument becomes fallacious when it presumes a series of intermediate steps each of which is highly improbable, leading to a presumed result which is so unlikely as to be nearly inconceivable (because the likelihood of the outcome is the product of the probabilities of each intermediate step). That's not what's going on here. We know that Iraq had WMDs and active programs to create others, and we k