Straw man logic

Excerpt from the President’s speech yesterday from the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington:

The stakes in Iraq are high, and we will not leave until victory has been achieved. (Applause.) Today there’s an intense debate about the importance of Iraq to the war on terror. The constant headlines about car bombings and killings have led some to ask whether our presence in Iraq has made America less secure. This view presumes that if we were not in Iraq, the terrorists would be leaving us alone. The reality is that the terrorists have been targeting America for years, long before we ever set foot in Iraq.

We were not in Iraq in 1993, when the terrorists tried to blow up the World Trade Center in New York. We were not in Iraq in 1998, when the terrorists bombed our embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. We were not in Iraq in 2000, when the terrorists killed 17 American sailors aboard the USS Cole. There wasn’t a single American soldier in Iraq on September the 11th, 2001, when the terrorists murdered nearly 3,000 people in the worst attack on our home since Pearl Harbor.

These acts are part of a grand strategy by the terrorists. Their stated objective is to drive the United States and coalition forces out of the Middle East so they can gain control of Iraq and use that country as a base from which to launch attacks against America, overthrow moderate governments in the Middle East, and establish a totalitarian Islamic empire that stretches from Spain to Indonesia. Hear the words of the terrorists. In a letter to the terrorist leader Zarqawi, the al Qaeda leader Zawahiri has outlined plans that will unfold in several stages. These are his words: “... Expel the Americans from Iraq. ... Establish an Islamic authority over as much territory as you can to spread its power in Iraq… Extend the jihad wave to secular countries neighboring Iraq.” End quote.

His tortured logic is breathtaking.

Let me start with the first paragraph. “Today there’s an intense debate about the importance of Iraq to the war on terror......This view presumes that if we were not in Iraq, the terrorists would be leaving us alone.” Then he goes to point out that the terrorists were attacking us before Iraq. But has anyone remotely suggested that the terrorists would be leaving us alone if we weren’t in Iraq? That’s not an argument I’ve ever heard, but it’s the straw man the Prez is advancing to build his case in the succeeding two paragraphs. Which is an odd argument for him to be making when it sounds as if he’s saying we’re targeted whether we’re in Iraq or not. If that’s the case, then the tired justification for fighting them there so we don’t have to fight them here doesn’t hold water. By his own words.

I have no quibble with the second paragraph. Al-Qaeda has been gunning for us since we moved troops into Saudi Arabia in the first Gulf War. There was this guy called Osama bin Laden....I think we were chasing after him in Afghanistan once....

The third paragraph, however, really takes a staggering leap to conflate past, present, and future. The grand strategy of the terrorists, in the preceding 12 years, has been to drive the United States and coalition forces out of the Middle East so they can gain control of Iraq? In what universe? The parallel one that the President inhabits, perhaps. If memory serves, Saudi Arabia politely kicked us out of their country and Saddam kept a tight lid on his country with regard to the fundamentalist Islamic nut cases. He ran a secular country and did not want any truck with the fundies. They were a threat to his power. And, if memory further serves, the fundie nut cases were doing pretty well without tinkering around in Iraq. We’re the ones who put Iraq on their radar and opened up the country for their operations [to expel us and do as much damage to us as possible in the process], by creating a huge power vacuum with no bright ideas on how to quickly or constructively fill it.

But the next part of the third paragraph is the one that really drives me nuts. To prove his point that Iraq was always the apple of the terrorists eyes for their operations, the Prez quotes Zarqai’s letter that was written after we’d invaded Iraq. Not before. After. That makes a whole world of difference in the attempt to establish Iraq as the fundie terrorists’ preferred base of al-Qaeda operations. Of course they want to expel us from Iraq. Now that we’re there. And of course they want to establish an authoritative empire without our interference. That’s what fundies everywhere want and we’ve given them a pretty good leg up. But it’s still a bogus argument. If there was no war in Iraq (or if we’d managed the post-war competently), there would be no power vacuum and no opportunity (or desire) for a fundie terrorist base in Iraq. And, oh, maybe we’d have caught that Osama guy by now.

And yet, the Prez weaves his story all together [apparently] seamlessly as justification #568 for the war in Iraq and for claiming that Iraq is (and always was) the center of the war on terrorism. That’s the use of mesmerizing words arranged in a way that sounds sensible, to hell with chronological facts. It’s like throwing all the facts in a hat along with with a wildcard straw man and then pulling them out one by one to arrange them in a pleasing fashion, whether the final picture has anything to do with reality or not. The facts are all there, but they are arranged artfully and glued together with a straw man to prove a false premise—that war in Iraq was necessary to defeat the terrorists.

If a high school essay had invented straw men and arranged facts this way to prove an argument, it would have received a big fat F. Either the President is as dumb as a box of rocks or he and his handlers believe (probably accurately) that a large number of Americans aren’t critical thinkers and accept what he says as gospel because a) it’s easier and/or b)they don’t care enough to think critically when the subject doesn’t impact their lives very much. Really, though, I’d say all of the above. Plus, of course, the wingnuts who think he walks on water no matter what comes out of his mouth.