[Dean's World] Dave Price: In Victor, Veritas

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Posted by Dave Price:
In Victor, Veritas
http://www.deanesmay.com/posts/1141231105.shtml


   After returning from Iraq, Victor Hanson [1]notes that the war over
   the war has turned out to be more difficult that the war itself.

     For many, Iraq is no longer a war whose prognosis is to be judged
     empirically. It has instead transmogrified into a powerful symbol
     that apparently must serve deeply held, but preconceived,
     beliefs--the deceptions of Mr. Bush, the folly of a neoconservative
     cabal, the necessary comeuppance of the American imperium, or the
     greed of an oil-hungry U.S.

   Empiricism is really the foundation of Western philosophy, and more
   than anything else explains why the West became so dominant while the
   dogmatic Islamic and mystical Chinese civilizations, both superior to
   the West in every way at some point, stagnated in relative terms. So
   when either side of a political debate begins to abandon empiricism in
   favor of sophistry or demagoguery, your suspicions should be aroused.
   Our democracy is very poll-driven, and as a result perception can
   drive reality, rather than logic and facts. This is generally
   undesirable and sometimes even tragic, as wtih the misreporting of the
   Tet Offensive as a defeat, which eventually led to decades of
   totalitarian enslavement for tens of millions of South Vietnamese, who
   must look at South Korean freedom and prosperity with a terrible,
   tragic sense of =E2what if.=E2 So breathless media and commentariat
   reports that support for the war is falling strike me as somewhat like
   the fox complaining about lax security leading to the alarming number
   of chickens missing from the henhouse: they created the perception,
   and now they=E2re reporting the results of their efforts, sometimes even
   citing the polling as proof they were right. (FDR had a solution to
   this problem: he called the network heads in and told them to either
   give positive war coverage or face forcible government takeover. If
   you have to ask what their response was, you haven=E2t been paying
   attention to how the media have reacted to credible threats of force
   from Muslim extremists over printing cartoons. While I wouldn=E2t
   advocate such a course of action today, it=E2s fun to imagine how even
   the merest suggestion of such an action by Bush would be received by
   the Helen Thomas contingent. Perhaps if Bush himself became a Muslim
   extremist=E2=A6)
   Ultimately, all this relates to a postmodernist notion, widely held in
   our media and on the left, that there is no definable objective
   reality by facts and observation, just different viewpoints based on
   our opinions. You can begin to understand why it=E2s so dangerous for
   the gatekeepers of information to have such an outlook when you
   realize that while thousands were tortured and maimed and thousands
   more killed at Abu Ghraib as official Iraqi policy, when the media
   refers to =E2the notorious Abu Ghraib prison=E2 they do so because of a
   few American miscreants who sexually humiliated Iraqi prisoners for
   kicks and were later tried and punished for it, and they gave the
   latter about a hundred times as much attention despite it being
   trivial in relative scale.
   The problem is broader than a few incidents, of course. As I=E2ve noted
   before in the comments, the overall definition of what constitutes
   success in Iraq is quite fluid, and seemingly recedes as reality
   approaches it. Before March 2003, I think we would have called the
   removal of Saddam=E2s regime with minimal casualties a success almost
   regardless of what replaced it. In 2004, with Saddam overthrown,
   having an elected government was apparently the bar, as the skeptics
   claimed Iraqis neither wanted nor were capable of democracy. In 2005,
   after elections became a reality, a working =E2exit strategy=E2 was the
   definitive criterion. Now, in 206, with all those met, the elimination
   of sectarian violence has assumed the role of [2]Zeno=E2s hare.
   I think it=E2s instructive to go back to the original standard. Besides
   the usual litany of mass graves, using WMD against Iraqi citizens, the
   invasions of Kuwait and Iran, and the two million dead, Omar at ITM=E2s
   [3]latest post on the trial of Saddam provides an illustrative example
   of why the original standard was probably the correct one:

     The documents revealed some unbelievably terrifying facts about the
     Dujail massacre; can you imagine that when orders were given to
     execute the 148 "convicts" the prison authorities executed only 96
     of them. Why?
     Because the remaining 48 "convicts" had already passed away during
     "interrogation"!!
     What kind of interrogation was that killed one third of the
     suspects?!

   .

References

   1. http://www.opinionjournal.com/editorial/feature.html?id=3D110008030
   2. http://www.redpython.co.uk/Paradoxes/zeno_achilles_paradox.htm
   3. http://iraqthemodel.blogspot.com/2006/02/trial-just-got-interesting.h=
tml