Your Humble Blogger read an op-ed by Rosa Brooks in yesterday’s Hartford Courant. The Courant headlined it Bad Reasons To Stay - Or Go. It was reprinted from the Los Angeles Times, who had called it Clear-eyed questions about Iraq. It was a column on rhetoric, essentially, or on the gap between logical argument and rhetorical persuasion. Except it wasn’t.
Ms. Brooks writes “a guide to some of the worst arguments — on both sides of the debate.” The arguments she cites are actually slogans, things like “We have a responsibility to the Iraqis — we can't withdraw” or “We need to withdraw from Iraq in order to truly support our troops”, and she doesn’t acknowledge the possibility that rhetors are using those slogans as a sort of shorthand for deeper arguments with actual information backing them up. On the other hand, it’s worth pointing out that the shorthand winds up taking the place of the deeper argument, particularly in short-form discussions, like television shows or candidate debates. So, you know, there’s some use there. It would have been more useful, though, to examine what the actual arguments are behind the slogans, because some of them are, in fact, moderately persuasive.
Her point, though, is to try to get the persuasion out: “If we're serious about resolving the Iraq crisis, we need to get away from the rhetoric of sacrifice, cost and responsibility and instead ask clear-eyed questions about our capacities and interests.” It’s a futile goal, but that doesn’t mean that it’s not worth attempting. Like objectivity, clear-eyed-ness-osity is something that can’t be achieved, but can usefully be approached, simply as a way to avoid its opposite, in this case, presumably, teary-eyed-ness-osity. So. Yes, Ms. Brooks, we should try to talk about what we can do, what we want to do, what we are willing to do, and what we can afford to do (meaning, what we are willing to underfund or not fund at all in order to attempt to achieve our goals). True, true, true.
But here’s the problem. To make these oh-so-clear-eyed decisions, to begin to formulate answers to the questions Ms. Brooks poses—“What's the worst-case scenario if U.S. troops remain indefinitely? What will staying — or leaving — cost us in terms of allies, intelligence and regional cooperation and stability?”—we would need information that is only available to us from this Administration, and this Administration has been repeatedly shown to lie whenever it suits their purposes, and even when it doesn’t. In other words, we make decisions based on facts and on analysis of facts, and accepting facts and analysis from this Administration is the bleariest-eyed thing I can imagine. Ms. Brooks is eschewing persuasive rhetoric not for cold hard fact but for warm gooey lies, and building her foundation thereupon. Not a good idea.
Still, it’s better than Fred Hiatt’s insistence that everybody really agrees with him, except of course those wacky Democratic primary voters. Meanwhile, on the front page of his own newspaper, Karen DeYoung and Thomas E. Ricks attempt to write about Exit Strategies based on anonymous leaks and a war game, without, by the way, telling us what about the war game might make it instructive. Oh, and Anne Applebaum writes that there are No Magic Bullets For Iraq, where she advocates ... what, exactly? Not leaving, not surging. “There are no obvious solutions,” she writes, which I suppose lets her out of finding any solutions at all.
I know left Blogovia has been saying this for-fucking-ever, but as Joshua Micah Marshall over at TPM repeats, the question at the moment is whether we as a nation will commit to leaving as soon and as completely as possible. If we can force that commitment, then we presumably can discuss how quickly, how completely and how safely it will occur. These are logistic discussions. They can’t happen, not usefully until we start getting reliable information from reliable people.
Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.