Debate on Bricker's Moral Assertions [ed. title]

Great Debates
61

[QUOTE=Bricker]

For me, the answer is: while I am troubled by the facts, I do not believe we’ve reached a point where I can conclude that the President deliberately, pre-meditatively, and repeatedly lied. The conduct post-invasion is attributable to surprise and lack of contingency planning, not malice or lying.

[/QUOTE]

You are aware that the lack of contingency planning was deliberate, not an oversight, right? This is a Rumsfeld/Pentagon screwup, not a Bush screwup by the way - I don’t expect him to be telling the generals how to go about planning. But the Pentagon deliberately ignored an existing State Department study on post-invasion contingencies. Similarly, Rumsfeld’s refusal to supply an adequate number of troops for the occupation was a result of his ideological committment to doing more with less, which has continued past the point where any sane person thinks it is working. Refusing to face reality due to ideological blinders is one of the worst forms of incompetence in my book.

62

[QUOTE=Bricker]
People who believe that Bush’s team either lied or was grossly incompetent have a lot of solid argument on their side. It’s a reasonable position to take. I just don’t share it – but I don’t dismiss it out of hand.
[/quote]

I’m always impressed by your reasonableness and sound analysis. However, in this case, I’m troubled by this Yes, it seems like you’ve got very strong proof, but I’m still not quite sure I’m convinced stance. What quantum of evidence are you waiting for to push you over the line? What is holding you back?

What about if we talk about the Bush administration in terms of a “reckless disregard for the facts” standard? When you hold that up next to the Bush administration’s actions, how does the analysis come out for you?

(In defamation law, reckless disregard for the truth is tantamount to proof of actual malice. If one were to conclude that the administration showed a reckless disregard for the facts with regard to its Iraq policy, do you think it fair to treat them as if they acted in bad faith?)

63

[QUOTE=acsenray]
I’m always impressed by your reasonableness and sound analysis. However, in this case, I’m troubled by this Yes, it seems like you’ve got very strong proof, but I’m still not quite sure I’m convinced stance. What quantum of evidence are you waiting for to push you over the line? What is holding you back?

What about if we talk about the Bush administration in terms of a “reckless disregard for the facts” standard? When you hold that up next to the Bush administration’s actions, how does the analysis come out for you?

(In defamation law, reckless disregard for the truth is tantamount to proof of actual malice. If one were to conclude that the administration showed a reckless disregard for the facts with regard to its Iraq policy, do you think it fair to treat them as if they acted in bad faith?)
[/QUOTE]

The problem is that we have to careful of imputing to the administration THEN then knowledge we have NOW. They had analysis teams – some saying A, some saying B, some saying C. Deciding what weight to give those analyses was undoubtedly influenced to some degree by what they wanted to hear… but I don’t believe it was recklessly done. That is, for every fact you can point out that they supposedly recklessly disregarded, I can point out why they were relying upon some alternate explanation. Before the war, there were not too many public voices that advanced the idea there simply were NO WMDs.

64

[QUOTE=Bricker]
The problem is that we have to careful of imputing to the administration THEN then knowledge we have NOW. They had analysis teams – some saying A, some saying B, some saying C.
[/quote]

By the nature of policy, political, and governmental operations, we are never going to have a smoking gun. The administration has worked hard to preserve plausible deniability and has used propaganda effectively to make sure it has cover, even from statements from the Democratic side. From a pragmatic point of view, we have to use inference and circumstantial evidence to decide whether the administration acted competently and good faith.

It seems to me that you are demanding a level of certainty that would prevent us from ever holding our government – no matter who is in power – accountable for acting in bad faith or incompetently. How can we survive if we give a tremendous degree of power to certain individuals to act in our name while at the same time grant them every single benefit of the slightest doubt when holding them to account? This is not a criminal trial – beyond a reasonable doubt is not the appropriate standard of judgment.

And here is where democracy fails then, because every plausible explanation is given equal weight to the preponderance of circumstantial evidence.

This might be facially true, but it is fundamentally misleading.

First of all, part of the reason why that few public voices were saying that there were no WMDs was that (1) the administration’s potential critics had only the adminstration itself as a source, and (2) for a variety of reasons, including many that were intentional on the part of the administration, the administration’s critics were politically cowed to a position of fearing to take a stance too much in opposition to the administrations claims.

Furthermore, the question “Does Saddam possess WMDs that he could use against us?” was not the only question that a competent and sincere policymaker should have been asking at the time. There were many others, including –

  1. What is the overall level of the threat presented by the Hussein regime?
  2. What is the likely effectiveness of means other than military action to ameliorate this threat?
  3. What is the likely effectiveness of military action – both invasion and actions short of invasion – to ameliorate this threat?
  4. What are the likely side-effects of the use of military action on this threat, or other threats?
  5. If invasion is the only effective option available, what are the minimum requirements for such an invation (troop levels, etc.)?
  6. What are the non-military actions that will be necessary to support a political victory in the wake of the invasion (restoration of services, public order, etc.)?

Not only does the number of questions go on and on, but the subparts to these questions go on and on.

Can you say with a straight face that the evidence has not showed that the Bush administration did not take these questions seriously? That, indeed, the administration had not entered office in 2001 intending to depose Hussein at the first opportunity?

We know that there were people in the State Department and the Defense Department that took these questions seriously, and that Rumsfeld refused to even consider their analysis and planning at all (and then punished some for their impertinence), much less take it seriously?

65

[QUOTE=Bricker]
Not at all. It should be illegal because it’s harmful, and because that particular horse is still in the barn. The booze and tobacco horses are out; there’s no use trying to shut the barn door on them.

[/quote]

Well, at this point, pot being in the barn is kind of like prostitution being in the barn. Making it illegal certainly doesn’t stop people, even generally law-abiding upright citizens, from smoking it.

Another tack: Let’s assume for the moment that pot and alcohol are equally harmful (when, in fact, alcohol is far MORE harmful). Now, we are outlawing people smoking pot privately in their own home. There just aren’t that many things that, in this day and age, we tell people they can’t do at private in their own home. (Not counting things like “commit wire fraud”, which isn’t really in private at home, as it involves communicating with people outside the home.) It’s a pretty short list: child porn, manufacturing meth, owning an unlicensed machine gun, etc. Things have to meet a pretty de facto high standard of harmfulness before we should be willing to tell people they can’t do them even at home in private. So, we, as a society, must think that the amount of damage that pot does is a VERY serious problem.

But if we do, then why are we complacent about booze just because it’s a pre-existing industry? If there were a pre-existing child porn industry, would we just say “eh, whatever”? I don’t see how pot can simultaneously be such an awful threatening scourge that we need to preemptively decrease freedom by telling people they can’t smoke it, EVEN IN PRIVATE, and at the same time, say about tobacco and alcohol “eh, horse is out of the barn, whatever”. Anything that is so threatening and awful that we should not allow people to do it in private should be something so awful that we are willing to fight it no matter what the preexisting circumstances are.
Am I making sense here?

So, gay men engaging in consensual sodomy in privacy back when that was illegal should have instead been going out in the street, engaging in consensual sodomy, and demanding to be arrested? Yeah, THAT would have helped their cause.

Or, alternatively, I should either always obey the speed limit, or I should drive incredibly fast and demand to be arrested?