{"id":10610,"date":"2007-09-10T21:02:56","date_gmt":"2007-09-11T01:02:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kith.org\/journals\/vardibidian\/2007\/09\/10\/10610.html"},"modified":"2018-03-12T16:56:57","modified_gmt":"2018-03-12T21:56:57","slug":"the-limitations-of-persuasion","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/2007\/09\/10\/the-limitations-of-persuasion\/","title":{"rendered":"The limitations of persuasion"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>So, every now and then, I get very cranky about political argument. I think the particular thing I get cranky about is a fairly common source of crank among people who like rhetoric and argument. It&#8217;s the lack of persuasiveness.\n<p>Look, I understand that most of the legislators who have the opportunity to spar with General Petreaus and Ambassador Crocker have no particular interest in persuading anybody of anything. Or, rather, of persuading anybody that a particular policy position is good or bad. A Democratic Representative in a safe Democratic district may want to persuade his anti-war constituents that he is pursuing their agenda, and a Republican Representative in a safe Republican district may want to persuade his anti-withdrawal constituents that he is pursuing their agenda. Neither, though, is likely to spend a great deal of effort attempting to persuade constituents to change their position. It&#8217;s possible that some are, but I didn&#8217;t hear any of that.\n<p>And, further, I understand that most of the people who still oppose withdrawal of US forces are going to be very difficult to persuade. On the other hand, the only way to precipitate withdrawal is through persuading a handful of Senators and a few dozen Representatives to legislatively mandate it.\n<p><I>Digression<\/I>: Even then, it seems very unlikely to YHB that we will begin anything like an actual withdrawal while Our Only President remains in office. The Congress can cut off funding, or withdraw its authorization of force, or whatnot, but if the Executive orders a company of soldiers to go to Iraq, it will go to Iraq, and it will stay there until the Executive orders it home. The Supreme Court may back up legislation (or it may not), but it will not issue orders to soldiers. If an Executive (particularly one like that headed by Our Only President that has stated its belief that it has sole and unique authority under the Constitution to act to protect the national security) simply ignores the Congress and the Supreme Court, it would be up to the Congress to remove that Executive from office. None of this has any chance of happening before the 20th January, 2008. On the other hand, a clear legislative mandate will help Our Next President, whoever that may be, begin a full and swift withdrawal.<I>End Digression<\/I>.\n<p>Which is why it&#8217;s such an interesting question. How do you persuade people that do not currently support withdrawal from Iraq (or do not currently support a legislative mandate for such withdrawal) to do so? I have some ideas, but I don&#8217;t think they are very good.\n<p>One way to go about it is to try to understand <I>why<\/I> thirty percent of the populace and a somewhat larger percentage of the legislature still want our troops in Iraq. There will be different and overlapping reasons, but let&#8217;s try and look at them.\n<ul><li><b>We need to have a permanent base in the Persian Gulf to protect the oil flow.<\/b> Note that very few people (at least public personages) admit to this as a driving motivation, but then they wouldn&#8217;t, would they? At any rate, I don&#8217;t think that there&#8217;s any really good way to persuade these people, unless they fall for the argument that the current situation is hopeless, politically and militarily, and the best thing is to let it lie for a few years and then try again.<\/li>\n<li><b>If we leave Iraq before [xxx], there will be a disaster within Iraq, a high likelihood of regional instability, and increased danger to US citizens from international terrorism.<\/b> The counter-argument here is that there is no [xxx] that will prevent those things from happening. Or at least that [xxx] is so unlikely and so expensive (in treasure and blood) that we may as well accept the disaster, instability and danger.<\/li>\n<li><b>Leaving is failing. American can&#8217;t be seen to fail.<\/b> It seems to me (and I think it was Rob Farley over at LGM that put it this way) that being the biggest, richest and most powerful country means that we can engage in overseas adventures like this and lose and <I>still<\/I> be big, rich and powerful. And, in fact, if we lose this was, we will have shown only that we can&#8217;t do a thing that we don&#8217;t need to threaten to do. I mean, if we decide to invade Zimbabwe , the fact that we can&#8217;t build a paradise when Robert Mugabe&#8217;s gone won&#8217;t affect how he sees the threat. We&#8217;ve certainly shown that we&#8217;re capable of getting rid of tyrants, and I can&#8217;t imagine that any tyrants will particularly care that we will leave their country in a shambles afterward&#8212;and if they do, even better!<\/li>\n<li><b>We&#8217;re just about to win!<\/b> Excellent. A perfect time to leave.<\/li><\/ul>\n<p>Seriously, none of this is going to be remotely convincing to anybody who isn&#8217;t already convinced. Nor is any of this going to be convincing to a Senator who thinks that leaving is the <I>right<\/I> thing to do but lacks the political will to <I>do<\/I> it. He can&#8217;t use any of that to save his job. The limitations of persuasion. Frustrating to watch. And, you know, I&#8217;m unlikely to be killed or maimed because of it.\n<p><I>Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus<\/I>,<br>-Vardibidian.\n<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>So, every now and then, I get very cranky about political argument. I think the particular thing I get cranky about is a fairly common source of crank among people who like rhetoric and argument. It\u2019s the lack of persuasiveness&#8230;.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[204,206],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10610","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","category-rhetoric"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10610","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10610"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10610\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18102,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10610\/revisions\/18102"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10610"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10610"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10610"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}