onegoodmove

Chris and I were not the only two to read Bush's Critics Meet the Logic Police and conclude it was a sham. Shortly before posting our take on Mr. Burgess-Jackson's article I returned to Tech Central to get the URL and discovered there were quite a number of comments posted in response to the article. A quick perusal of the comments unearthed this from Stephen Downes the author of the Guide to Logical Fallacies I mirror here. I found it quite remarkable how closely his words paralleled those Chris and I had written.

It is articles like this that give philosophers a bad name. Shrouded in a cloak of rhetoric lie fundamental misdirections that lead the reader to an incorrect conclusion.

The key point in the argument is that while critics attack Bush's motives for attacking Iraq, the real question is whether the war was justified, and that this justification is an objective measure independent of Bush's motives.

Of course, an analysis of the criticisms of the war finds that they are not based on a criticism of Bush's motives. Rather, they were based on the observation that the reasons being advanced in favour of the war were not sufficient to support the conclusion.

Critics, for example, expressed scepticism about Bush and Blair's claim that Iraq housed weapons of mass descruction, a suspiciion that today appears to have been warranted. They expressed doubt about the purported link between Iraq and Osama bin Laden. And they questioned whether Iraq was any more deserving a target for invasion than the many other unsavory regimes in the world, regimes that include among their numbers America's allies.

It is true that there was speculation about Bush's motives. But such speculation, far from being expressed as an objection to the war, was raised rather in an attempt to understand why Bush would pursue such a course when the stated reasons for the war were so transparently flimsy.

The author writes that the justification for the war exists independently of Bush's motives for the war. Maybe so (though by no means all philosophers cling to such a consequentialist notion of justification, despite it being baldly presented as fact in this article). But the justification for the war consists (at least prior to the war) in the reasons advanced for going to war, and the critics were, on reflection, quite right in casting doubt on this justification.

On a strict consequentialist point of view, we can ask about the justification for war by looking at the consequences. It is true that Hussein has been removed, vanished into hiding somewhere, that his army has been disbanded, and that his government's repressive policies have been halted. The cost to the Iraqi people, though, was high - it is no surprise to read blogger Salam Pax write that war is never the best solution, no matter how repressive the government.

It is not clear whether, in the long run, the Iraqi people will benefit from Hussein's removal, or whether they will, as in eras past, simply experience a period of colonial government followed by another dictator. America's record is not good in this regard. Nor is it clear whether they will be able to benefit from the resources of their country, or whether they will be plundered, ostensibly to 'pay for' a liberation they never sought. The current situation - a destroyed infrastructure, a colonial government, disease, starvation, anarchy and crime - offers no justification whatsoever for the war.

It is relevant today, though, to raise questions regarding Bush's motives, not in order to determine whether the war was justified - for it appears not to have been by the objective evidence available either before or after the war - but rather to assess whether Bush is guilty of a war crime. As any philosopher should well know, guilt or innocence is determined not only by consequences, but also by intent, and if Bush's intent was petty revenge, or whether it was to loot Iraq of its oil, then he is in fact guilty of a war crime and ought to be punished.

Indeed, the only bright note that can be said of this article is that it does clearly separate Bush's motives from the purported justification for the war, suggesting implicitly that not even Bush could have believed the lies he offered as grounds for its prosecution.

As for the author of this piece, I can only suppose that he, writing on the wrong side of the law of logic, as it were, must have felt that he trolled out of sight of the logic police, thinking, perhaps, that no philosophers ever descend to the depths of a journal with the word 'tech' in its title. Sadly, he was mistaken, and so his sad little sham is exposed.

As it should be