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"The history of our race, and each individual's experience, are sown thick with evidence that a truth is not hard to kill and that a lie told well is immortal." - Mark Twain.
The logical fallacy argumentum ad misercordiam asks us to accept the truth of a proposition out of pity for the sorry state of those making an argument. It is only by evoking such sympathy that mainstream news organizations can hope that we accept conspicuous and persistent inaccuracies in their coverage of the War on Terrorism. Not only have there been minor inconsistencies in coverage, but there have been unrelenting errors that betray a fundamental misunderstanding of President Bush's case for the War on Terror. It is not just that major new organizations display disagreement with Bush's position, but they display a depth of misunderstanding so deep that it is doubtfuk that some news organizations can ever emerge. Consider the following fantasies of the Left (oops, of the National Media): The Bush Administration was wrong in arguing that that (1) the threat for Iraq was imminent and (2) that Saddam's Iraq materially conspired with Al Qaeda to execute the September 11, 2001 attacks on the United States. Well. The Bush Administration did not make those argument and assertions that they did are either incredibly misinformed or are aimed at scorching the Administration in the flames of burning strawmen. Consider first the issue of whether the Bush Administration argued that Iraqi threat to the United States was "imminent." In September 2002, the White House published the National Security Strategy of the United States. The report explicitly recognized that threats facing the US came largely from stateless (though perhaps state-supported) institutions. During the Cold War, no matter how distasteful, we depended upon nuclear deterrence to prevent attacks. The new threat from stateless terrorist can not be dealt with similarly. In the words of the report: In a world where it might be possible for terrorist to acquire weapons that might kill thousands of innocents, waiting until a threat is "imminent" or "immediate" might to be grievously too late. More "anticipatory" action might be required. While some suggest that the preemption doctrine is a new one, it rests on at least a forty-year heritage. During the Cuban Missile Crisis, President John Kennedy's Administration argued that the blockade of Cuba - an act of war by any conventional definition - to prevent deployment of Soviet missiles in Cuba was justified even if the threat from such missiles was not immediate or imminent. By the time such a threat would become imminent, any action would be too late. The Kennedy Administration argued that self-defense might require military action before hostilities were imminent and exercised the prerogative.
The copyright of the article Getting It Wrong - Again in Conservative Politics is owned by . Permission to republish Getting It Wrong - Again in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.
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