Diagnosis: Liar

It seems that convicted terrorist Ahmed Ressam is dissatisfied with his sentence. Ressam was the terrorist convicted of plotting to blow up the Seattle Space Needle at the turn of the millennium. After his conviction, he began cooperating with the authorities, perhaps with a change of heart, but more likely just to get his sentence reduced.

U.S. District Judge John Coughenour of Seattle, who sentenced Ressam, said the information he provided was "startlingly helpful."

But Ressam's cooperation came to a halt by early 2003, resulting in charges being dropped against two other co[-]conspirators. His lawyers said years of solitary confinement, broken by periods of intense interrogation, had taken their toll on his mental health and corrupted his memory.

His mental health? He came in to the criminal justice system because he was trying to kill hundreds of innocent people. So, with respect to his mental health, what further harm is there to do, and how can we tell that harm is being done?

Maybe he now he's actually becoming wicked, and wants to contribute to global warming.

h/t Redstate

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The most illogical comment ever

You, TonyS, poster at Redstate.com, have won the honor of having your comment disassembled, in a game I like to call, "Fisk the Troll". I can tell you right now that your post is a difficult one to analyze, because it is so dense with fallacies. I will do my best to be fair, despite the inherent unfairness in the name of the game itself, but with material this rich, the likelihood for error is pretty high.

1. Finding scapegoats is fully unhelpful to the Iraq problem.
   While that is vacuously true, I must note that as it has been a principal occupation of anti-war bloggers, whose water and mantle you appear to carry, to cry failure and assign blame to that failure ever since the Iraq war began. It is now profoundly and insincerely disingenous to disclaim a desire to point fingers. Nevertheless, since you used the word "scapegoat", I have to agree that finding them is unhelpful (in any arena, not just Iraq, whence the charge of vacuity).
   
   
2. Let's be serious...if the media was so influential against Bush & the war, then why did he win reelection?
   
   Logically, that is:
   
   1. If the media is against a candidate, he will lose.
      
   2. Bush won.
      
   3. Therefore, the media was not against him.
      
   
   
   The problem with that is that the media does not always get what it wants. It is not, after all, monolithic and also tries to give the appearance of balance. Sometimes, it takes a while for their bias to infect the masses. In other words, your first premise relies on not just one but two unstated co-premises: 1) the public is anti-Bush, and 2) the public was just as anti-Bush in 2004 as now. Both of those statements would require proofs longer than your post.
   
   
3. If it was just the media, then why was bush taking responsibility for the war failures in his speech?
   
   As that is written, it is an obvious non sequitur, resulting in the fallacies of the false dilemma, the complex question, and the missing middle. It needs to be addressed, however, because it seems to have taken hold in the lefty nutosphere.
   
   There are several links missing in your chain of reasoning, and some of them in themselves may be fallacial. However, I will do my best to reconstruct the chain.
   
   
   
   1. Only media bias or significant mistakes could make the war unpopular
      
   2. There were no known significant mistakes before 2005
      
      1. If there were any known significant mistakes, the war would have been unpopular in 2004.
         
      2. The war was not unpopular in 2004, because Bush was reelected.
         
      3. Therefore, there were no known significant mistakes before 2004
         
   3. Therefore, if the war were not made unpopular by the media, then it would have been popular.
   4. The public has recognized serious mistakes since 2004
   1. Since the war is unpopular now, either there was media bias since 2004 or there were significant mistakes recognized since 2004.
   2. There were significant mistakes recognized since 2004
      
   1. Only significant mistakes could cause the President to take responsibility for any in his speech.
      
   2. Bush took responsibility for the war mistakes in his speech.
      
   3. Therefore, there must have been significant mistakes.
   5. Therefore it was not just the media.
      
   
   

   
   As always with the fallacies of this type, reconstruction is problematic, but I have attempted to do so in good faith. The major problem with the argument is that it presupposes a link between acknowledging mistakes, which is a leader's responsibility, and public opinion, which is shaped by media focus on mistakes. How did the public discover the mistakes, except through the media? If the war were still popular, would the President not have taken responsibility for any mistakes? Of course he would, as in a popular war there would be even less pressure on him not to accept his official responsibility.
   

   
   An essential ingredient in the above is the idea that the President would not have admitted any mistakes unless the public, without media assistance, insisted on it.
   

   
   
4. It wasn't the media that influenced him to ignore early military advice, it was Cheney & Rumsfield. What is the problem is that we entered the war being told that it will be a quick fight, we will be rewarded by the Iraqi people and all is well.

   What an ingenious use of the fallacy of false choice: you assume he ignored military advice, and that Cheney and Rumsfeld (not "Rumsfield") advised him to do so, and present the obviously false choice of the media as the only other thing that could have made him do what you falsely assume him to have done. In fact, he weighed all the options and concluded that a smaller force, with a smaller footprint, was better, essentially because in modern warfare against a non-traditional foe, agility is required. I have elsewhere argued that we did not defeat Iraq thoroughly enough, stopping before they apologized. There were reasons for that, but in the end they boil down to wanting to avoid bad PR. So in effect, it was the media which made him go in with too light a force.
   

   
   
5. Rumsfield excused the killing by saying that people die in every big city.

   At the time he said that, the death rate was comparable to that in major world cities.

   
   
6. They built us a house of cards & now it's falling.

   That's a poor metaphor, because a house of cards can't be renovated. They destroyed Dracula's Castle, but then the Turks wanted to build a mosque in its place, and they got trapped into allowing it.
   

7. Finally, it seems to me that the media followed the lead of the populace, not the other way around.

   This is your argument, in a nutshell, that the media is just telling the public what it wants to hear. It seems to me, on the other hand, that the media have pushed their anti-Bush agenda at least since April, 2003, when to their horror they saw an American flag raised over a foreign capitol. We'd "won", and they could not stand it, so they have done their best to make sure we "lost".
   

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Al-Reuters Pines for Stability

Via Yahoo! comes the masterful journalism of Al-Reuters, who stop just short of accusing President Bush of endangering the country by toppling one of its enemies. The President will appear on 60 Minutes on CBS, which Al-Reuters has the temerity to label a "news program". To be fair, since 60 Minutes is a vehicle for advancing the liberal agenda in the guise of a muckraking news program, it may be a simple mistake on Al-Reuters' part.

President George W. Bush acknowledged on Saturday that some of his administration's decisions during the Iraq war had contributed to instability there but he still believed he was right to topple Saddam Hussein.

Insisting it was crucial to U.S. interests to get the sectarian violence in Iraq under control, Bush told CBS in an interview that the strife there was a destabilizing force in the Middle East that "could lead to attacks here in America."

Pressed on whether actions by his administration had created further instability in Iraq, Bush said, "Well, no question, decisions have made things unstable."

There was stability before 9/11, with Saddam in power, and yet there were attacks on America and her overseas embassies and military structure. Stability did not prevent terror from coming to our soil. Oddly enough, despite all of the danger the instability in Iraq has caused, there have been no successful attacks since Saddam was toppled.

But look for this theme to continue in the coming months. Should there be an attack on U.S. soil or interests, no matter the value of the target or the level of damage, expect triumphant finger-pointing from Al-Reuters, CBS, and the rest of the dominant liberal branch of the MSM.

But there is one more BDS-enhanced graph to highlight in the Al-Reuters article.

Bush launched the invasion of Iraq in March 2003 promising to rid the country of weapons of mass destruction, but none were found. He said in the CBS interview that had Saddam been allowed to remain in power, the Iraqi leader would have been competing with Iran to acquire a nuclear weapon.

Al-Reuters presses the "Iraq was Bush's ill-considered whim" myth, doing whatever they can to play both the NoWMD™ and BushLied™ cards. They hint that the spectre of Iran getting nuclear weapons should be discredited by not finding them in Iraq. For their sake, I hope they're right. But for the sake of our troops overseas, the American populace, and the future of Western Civilization, I'm glad the method of safeguarding our future is not Al-Reuters' call.

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Why we must stay.

A commenter on Redstate.com asked "Why can't we just leave Iraq?" He asked why we didn't just let the Iraqi people vote, and leave if they said to go.

If you ask the average Iraqi whether they would like American troops to be gone in a year, they would say they would. If you ask an American the same, you'd get the same answer. But that doesn't mean the person wants the Americans out now, or even in a year if things are the same. It just means that other things being equal, why sure, we should be out in a year.

Conditions can change rapidly; that is part and parcel of why we don't run war by popular vote, or even through the legislature. It has to be run by an executive.

Furthermore, nobody (as in, not anyone) wants us to stay there forever.

But to answer your question:

The only rules that really matter are these: what a man can do and what a man can't do. For instance, you can accept that your father was a pirate and a good man or you can't. But pirate is in your blood, boy, so you'll have to square with that some day. And me, for example, I can let you drown, but I can't bring this ship into Tortuga all by me onesies, savvy? So, can you sail under the command of a pirate, or can you not?

-- Captain Jack Sparrow, Pirates of the Carribean, Dead Man's Chest

We could pull out of Iraq, but there would be negative consequences to America that either don't matter or are seen as positive by the Iraqis.

Our allies (and prospective allies) would learn that we will not be loyal in the face of resistance.

Our military would learn, in a lesson that would last at least a generation, that we don't have the will to win, and neither should they. I was a Marine in the era between Viet Nam and the Gulf War. We knew, and we hated it.

Our enemies would have even more evidence that we are a weak, ineffectual "paper tiger". Terror would be rewarded, and would flourish.

The simpering leftists in the MSM would be rewarded for defeatism.

All of the lives and energy, to say nothing of the treasure, we have used to fight in Iraq would be offeset only by the removal and death of Saddam Hussein. That's not enough.

The power vacuum would be enormous, which would lead to and increase in Iranian and Syrian control or influence. That is not acceptable, regardless of what the Iraqi public says.

But as it happens, the Iraqis did vote on it: they have a government. If that government didn't want us there, it would be crying to the United Nations, if nothing else. And yes, they could do that, because, as Capt. Jack said, there are only two rules. They think having us there is better than asking us to leave.

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Victory

Your cries have been echoing across the Internet for almost four years now. I won't bother to quote them, link to them, or even name names; you know who you are. Iraq is a quagmire! Iraq is Deja Nam! The anti-war Left have raised these rallying cries for two primary reasons: their unreasoning, intransigent opposition to anything favored by President George W. Bush, and a belief, held almost as deeply, that Western culture is inherently flawed. Since they see our culture as imperfect, any attempt to spread it is an act of evil.

These same leftists have been very right about Iraq, but only because they misunderstand war.

War is not simply the opposite of peace, nor its absence. War is not simply "diplomacy by other means". War's purpose is not to bully the other side into letting you have your way, to create vassal states or puppet regimes, or to build nations. Neither is it war's end to remove the enemy's means of enforcing his objectives. The purpose of war is Victory, which I hold to be quite different from any of the above.

While Peace is a good thing, Peace is loathsome without Justice, Freedom, or Honor. To accept Peace without Justice is to force rage below the surface. Denied our final vengeance, we exact terms; unconvinced of his error, our terms cause rage in our foe which will rise when we expect it least. To accept Peace without Freedom is as contrary to Liberality now as in 1776. To accept Peace without Honor is to accept a prize which we have not ourselves won, and will not love.

The purpose of war is to extract a sincere apology. The enemy must be so thoroughly defeated that he understands his defeat not merely as poor luck or unfortunate circumstances; he must understand it as a measure of the value of his ideas. His loss must cause him to disavow his reason for fighting.

In the early Nineteenth century, the converse was taught to Napoleon Bonaparte by some Spaniards whom he had thought defeated. Taking to the countryside, these men fought on. Unable to face down the huge Grand Army of the Napoleonic Empire, the Spaniards in their "little warfare" harassed and annoyed Napoleon badly enough that the British were able to turn him back from Spain. Ever since then, the Spanish word guerrilla has been used for the tactics employed by armies which are too small to fight conventionally, but which have not been brought to heel.

When Napoleon was later defeated by the combined armies of Britain, Russia, and the rest of Europe, it was because France learned it could not do what Napoleon said it could do. France fought for the personal cult of Napolean, and after a first defeat he went into exile on Elba. He retained his life and some personal property, and while some troops remained loyal, he was forced to renounce the right of succession. It took an escape from Elba and another defeat before all of France was finally done with him.

Consider also the American Civil War, in which victory by the North caused the Confederate States to realize that the Union, not just the Union Army, was their master. No more would States be allowed to challenge Federal authority. The end of slavery was a happy byproduct of that more fundamental and perhaps less fortunate change.

After World War I, Germany was allowed to negotiate an armistice, or cease fire. To the Germans, what should have been seen as a defeat was merely seen as a setback. Without the epiphany of utter defeat, the reparations imposed on them caused rage to bubble under the surface. The dream of at least symbolically reviving the Holy Roman Empire lived on. It took another war, and millions of lives, to drive the lesson home.

The purpose of war is to have a defeated foe say, "We are sorry. You were right to oppose our wicked ways." Victory is incomplete until the loser internalizes the outcome.

It is a mistake to stop merely because the enemy no longer has the means of opposition. As Napoleon, the guerrillas, and the Germans in 1933 demonstrate, where there is will and hope, the means will appear.

Which brings us back to Iraq. Our mission in Iraq did look like Deja Nam, and it did have the makings of a quagmire, but it looked that way and had those makings because we were not willing to bring the enemy to a thorough repudiation of his prior position. We left Saddam's loyalists in the field, hoping that they would come to understand his thorough political and moral bankruptcy, but we declared victory before the enemy aplogized. Retaining will and hope, the means have arisen from Iran, Syria, and other islamoterrorism funders eager to control Iraq and to oppose the United States.

The shape of victory in Iraq is left as an exercise for the reader.

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A little too Pat

Televangelist and former Presidential candidate Pat Robertson has forecast a terrorist incident for next Fall. He said God told him it would happen, but not whether it would be a nuclear attack or not.

Since Pat said God told him it would happen, we have to interpret his remarks inside of Pat's own religious tradition, which holds the Bible to be the inerrant word of God. At the very least, the Bible's description of the Christian faith and practices should be considered authoritative. In particular, what the Bible says about making predictions should be our best guide in these matters.

Here is what the Bible says about prophecy and prophets (NIV):

22 You may say to yourselves, "How can we know when a message has not been spoken by the LORD ?" 22 If what a prophet proclaims in the name of the LORD does not take place or come true, that is a message the LORD has not spoken. That prophet has spoken presumptuously. Do not be afraid of him. Deuteronomy 18:21-22

8 ...Because of your false words and lying visions, I am against you, declares the Sovereign LORD. 9 My hand will be against the prophets who see false visions and utter lying divinations. They will not belong to the council of my people or be listed in the records of the house of Israel, nor will they enter the land of Israel. Then you will know that I am the Sovereign LORD. -- Ezekiel 13:8-9

Robertson makes predictions for the year a regular practice. Last year he predicted hurricanes as bad as a tsunami would hit the U.S. Pacific coast. It didn't happen. "I have a relatively good track record," he said. "Sometimes I miss." The perpendicular pronoun strikes again.

By his own admission, Pat Robertson is a false prophet, and is making these things up.

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Penalty for Early Withdrawal?

Poor Markos. The New York Times as his irrefutable authority, he quotes their article saying:

1. Bush is looking for someone to blame, label as traitor
2. Bush thinks General Casey too interested in withdrawal, not victory
3. Bush thinks this is cause of problem

He repeats the above, snarkily:

We're losing the war because our top general in Iraq doesn't want to win, he wants to get out. And since withdrawal equals defeat, any effort to reduce our military footprint in Iraq is, by definition, defeat. It's that simple!

And goes boldly on with:

No one wants to win in Iraq. Not even the troops! Hang them all as traitors!

Fallacy by hyperbole. (Many people want to win in Iraq. Withdrawal from a stable Iraq was the plan all along. General Casey is not the troops. No one is suggesting that General Casey is a traitor.)

Woe are Bush, McCain, Lieberman, and the 101st Fighting Keyboardists. Alone in their mighty struggle against "Islamofascism". They are the last line of defense against Sharia Law in the United States. Or something.

Intended as biting sarcasm, revealing that Kos thinks that either A) Islamofascism is too weak to require opposition or B) he himself opposes Islamofascism, by whatever name.

(if only we could get them and their families to actually pick up a rifle and fight for what they supposedly believe in...)

Ah, the Chickenhawk Attack (argumentum ad hominem, with a healthy dose of tu quoque thrown in for good measure) Apparently the fallacious nature of the Chickenhawk Attack is lost on Kos.

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