Centerfield

bogus rationale

partisanship regarding iraq not only stymies debate, but the petty need to take partisan jabs whenever possible undermines otherwise valid observations/arguments by making the audience far more skeptical than is perhaps warranted. example (not a particularly good one, just the one i ran across this morning): reading tim noah/chatterbox at slate, who notes that former senior clinton foreign policy experts
"are constrained from protesting the war's bogus 'weapons of mass destruction' rationale because they, too, thought Saddam was hiding chemical and biological weapons." chatterbox apparently couldn't resist labeling the WMD rationale "bogus," yet must admit that the "clintonistas" (his word, not mine) also thought such weapons existed. so the rationale can only be bogus if we don't care what the administration believed, but instead only look to whether those beliefs were correct in hindsight (leaving aside that the jury's still out on that question). but that's not generally how we judge rationales, as chatterbox effectively concedes (another possibility is that the bushies knew something the clintonistas didn't, but chatterbox doesn't imply that, nor would such an assertion be consistent with the fact that most everyone else thought iraq still had WMDs).

the point is this: regardless of who's right or wrong on the merits of the rationale, chatterbox effectively answers his own question (why don't the clintonistas criticize the war? because they buy the WMD rationale) and then ignores the answer, perhaps because doing so permits him to label bush's proffered rationale as "bogus." not a big deal really -- there are many, many other grounds to criticize the war and reconstruction that aren't intellectually dishonest or hypocritical (e.g., even believing that iraq had WMDs, even if your standard is not imminent threat but something lesser, we could have worked with the international community to further isolate and constrain the prior regime, or we could have planned better for reconstruction, or we shouldn't be building bridges in iraq when people sleep homeless on the streets of dc and every other city in this country, etc.) -- but it throws me, makes me wonder what other subtle bias lurks in other otherwise straightforward stories/articles/posts/etc.