WordPlay - Populism, Problems, and Solutions

A 9-11 Story, with a Nod at Columbine

    There must be a zillion 9-11 stories. Here's mine, not so much an account of the event as an explanation why the event is meaningful to me.

    My younger daughter is neurologically disabled. She is not at all mentally retarded. In fact, she is almost unnaturally alert and involved in her environment. But due to what appears to have been a prenatal injury (not her mother's fault), the processing is off in her brain. The result is an array of autistic-like behaviors that collectively disable her. Her speech is literally childish, her gait is the off-balance duck walk of a one time toe walker, and she has the obsessiveness and eye for irrelevant detail of the true autistic. All this results in profound disability. After a few years of frustration, she ended up in the class of the 'educably retarded', in which environment she is quite comfortable.

    But she is not dumb, quite bright, in fact. (Beneath her mangled syntax and garbled pronunciation, her active vocabulary is actually age normal, maybe above.) The upshot of all this is the paradox, that while  she is comfortable with the special ed routine, she is also very easily bored by it. Back in 1998, when she was 10, the boredom began to show itself in some acting out behavior that was not a good omen for the future. Her mother (from whom I am divorced) and I thought it would be a good idea to have her spend a month each year in an environment as different and as far from home as possible. There are all sorts of special camps for special kids. We wanted one at a fair distance from anything familiar. We are Californian. I found one in the Catskills, upstate New York, with a month long term, beginning in late July, ending in late August. It was expensive, but not pricey. The references were excellent. In February of 1998, we enrolled her in the camp. She went that following July.

    It became summer routine. Between 1998 and 2004 (when she became too old), her mother would take her to the camp. A month later, towards the end of August, I'd come to New York, enjoy Manhattan for a few days, then drive upstate and pick my daughter up. Then it would be back to Manhattan for another day or two of sight-seeing, then home to  the San Francisco Bay Area. A routine developed.  After we returned from camp, we'd check into a Times Square hotel, visit Virgin Records, roam Times Square, and see an appropriate musical. Then next day, some morning event, lunch at the Top of the World restaurant at the World Trade Center, and something in the afternoon.  Monday  or Tuesday, the flight home, always the 8:00 a.m flight out of Newark to San Francisco. Newark is a much better access point to lower Manhattan than either of the NYC airports.

    2001 was no different. We showed up at the Top of the World on day two after the camp pick up. I was touched that the waiter remembered us. It wasn't that we were expected, but my daughter is a very memorable personality and this was the fourth year in a row we had appeared in late August. The human memory is capable of phenomenal feats of detail. The lunch was lovely, and my wonderful little girl enjoyed the awesome vista, as she always does. The next day we flew out of Newark back home to the Bay Area.

    I could dress this up and say that this was one day, or two, before 9/11. But it wasn't. It was two weeks to the day before that event. Two weeks later, our flight would be the one hijacked and crashed into to the Pentagon. I don't know what happened to our waiter with the good memory that day. My hope is that he had not yet arrived for work.

     Not the closest brush with fate, but close enough. The mental image I have, of me sitting with my perpetual little girl, doing my best to comfort her, answering her machine gun questions -  she talks a mile a minute when she is excited or nervous, and she sure as hell would have been scared out of her wits - while four maniacs who know nothing of her vitality, her innocence, her intensity, the lives she has touched, her immense value, prepare to murder her for no good reason whatsoever, except their own lust for self-glorification - makes me dizzy with fury and relief, seven years later, as I write this. This (obviously) is history that never happened. Yet the event touched close enough to make the scenario as vivid as the reality itself. Perhaps you have to know my daughter.

    'For no good reason' - that to me is the point. I have been in criminal law for 35 years, a prosecutor for the last 18. Without doubt, my world view has been shaped by my career. For better or worse, I see the world through that lens. In practice, that means a tendency to analyze actions and behavior in terms of stark, immediate motivation. Forget all your meaning of-life beliefs, what does what you did gain you?  More money? Impress the girl? Self gratification of some other type? Spare me the subtleties, the next ten years, and the life to come, what do you get NOW??

    This perspective is likely the point of departure between me and the Demented Left. I don't necessarily believe the reasons stated for a criminal act are the actual motivators for that act.  In my opinion, that is very infrequently the reality. In the case of the 9/11 conspirators, spare me your discussions of the Palestine problem, the 11 Century Caliphate, or obscure suras in the Quran. These are rationalizations, and transparent ones at that. What is really going on is the same narcissistic interest in self-glorification through spectacular acts of public violence and destruction that motivates high-school shooters - the Columbine pair, for example.

    Both crimes involve unsocialized, unfeminized males, who become morbidly fascinated with grandiose  acts of destruction. They do not have some reason to shoot their classmates, and then shoot them on that basis. They decide to shoot their classmates and then find a rationale. They do not fly planes into buildings because they are religious martyrs. They become fascinated with the idea of flying planes into buildings and only latterly become religious martyrs. They are first and last criminals, and by definition unprincipled - despicable, cowardly narcissists.

    There are some implications from this for how these appalling acts are to be approached analytically. There is at present, and will be for some time, an ongoing debate as to whether Islam is a violent or peaceable religion. I am no Islamic scholar, and not about to become one.  But the correct answer seems to me that it is both - as are Christianity, Judaism, Hindu, and the other major faiths. Just as Christianity has enough substance to provide fodder for the mystic St. Theresa of Avila and the ultra-rational Aquinas, for Quaker brethren and Jesuit warrior priests, so does Islam provide enough universality to house both soldier and peacemaker. The religion would not be a major faith if it did not have this degree of universality, a place for every type of personality.  The question, then, is not what the religion offers (everything), but what the actor chooses to find in it. Am Anfang war die Tat, in the beginning was the Deed, Goethe wrote famously in Faust, and so it is with crimes of this type.

    It is the misfortune of the whole Earth at present that the Middle East produces these criminal males in enormous numbers - young men with no viable future in their society, no hope of achieving social status, no possibility of intimacy with young women, for whom the notion of spectacular, violent destruction (with simultaneous suicide) becomes an enthralling possibility of self-realization. I was not sure whether or not the Iraq War was a wise tactic or not - I am still unsure.

    But I am quite sure that the worst move of all would have been to leave those stagnant, morbid societies in the same state they were in at that time, spewing out masses of angry, alienated young males. Change of any kind had to be an improvement over the status quo, and I am glad that it is underway. The crime against my daughter never happened, as vivid as the scenario is to me. But there were others on those planes, comforting frightened children, hoping against hope, at the mercy of monsters. They stood in our place. I am not about to forget them.

A Genius for the Capillary - Willie Horton Revisited

    The Main Stream Media really knows how to attack personalities it doesn't like. But it also knows how to defend personalities it does like. In these last few decades, it has liked Democratic Presidential candidates to the point of adoration. This protection can take as infinite a number of forms as the English language has nuances, from bad jokes to nonchalant indifference to vicious deliberate slander. I expect Barack Obama to travel under this protective shield through the balance of 2008.

   Today I am going to look back at one of the more interesting MSM defense tactics of recent years, the successful diversion of a potentially lethal attack against the jugular into a remediable cut on the capillary. This was the method by the manner in which the MSM defused a potentially devastating issue that confronted the Dukakis campaign in 1988. I am referring to the scandal that arose by the unaccountable grant by the Dukakis administration of weekend furlough privileges to Willie (or 'William') Horton, a first degree murderer serving a life term in prison in Massachusetts. As almost every one remembers, Horton did not return from the furlough, but instead fled to Maryland. There he perpetrated a horrific burglary/kidnapping/rape against a luckless young couple. He sits now in a Maryland prison, there for life, as the authorities in Maryland for obvious reasons have no intention of returning him to the gentler care of Massachusetts.

    A scandal lay at the base of this tragedy, not the private kind, which are bad enough, but the truly monumental public kind - official nonfeasance so aggravated that it was tantamount to malfeasance, so gross that it is in fact prima facie evidence of a character disorder. Without explanation (and none was ever forthcoming), it should have been immediately decisive, a dagger in the heart of the candidacy of Michael Dukakis. Why and how the immediate impact was not is the subject of this piece.

    A little background. Work furlough programs are in use throughout the United States in a variety of prisons and jails. Work furlough is distinguishable from parole in that the inmate is released to a day job of some sort, but returns at the end of the shift to the jail or prison that he or she left. For the vast majority of nonviolent offenders who pose no imminent risk of harm, and who are shortly going to be returned to society either by parole or serving out their term, these programs make a lot of sense. The prisoner becomes acclimatized to life outside the institution, and creates a place for himself when released. The chances of coming back are at least marginally reduced.

    But these laudable goals make no sense at all in the case of prisoners serving terms of life without possibility of parole or parole so far off in the future that acclimatization to society is meaningless. There are both moral objections - these terms reflect the gravity of the offense, and are often imposed in lieu of the death penalty - and practical - these are ultra-dangerous personalities who pose a clear threat to ordinary citizens. With one exception, in 70's and 80's, no state in the Union offered work furlough to lifers.

    The one exception was Massachusetts, under Michael Dukakis, during the so-called Massachusetts Miracle. How this situation came to be is inexplicable. The Massachusetts legislature authorized a work furlough program in 1972 during the term of Dukakis' predecessor, Philip Sergent.  Although the reasons why the program should not extend to life termers are self-evident, the  Massachusetts Supreme Court, finding that the legislative intent was unclear, held that it extended to first-degree murderers. (Massachusetts is evidently as over lawyered a state as California or New York.) The legislature immediately clarified its intent by enacting legislation that expressly barred life termers from participating in work furlough programs.

    Dukakis vetoed it, noting that enactment of the legislation would "cut the heart out of inmate rehabilitation." Both Dukakis' action, and the expressed rationale, are jaw droppers, literally stupefying. There is no element of rehabilitative purpose in a life sentence - that is exactly the reason why the term is life. Also, at the practical level of real human behavior, extending the work furlough privilege to life termers means that the State is basically relying their sense of honor - nonexistent in the vast majority of cases - as the only of their guarantee their return to confinement. In essence, Dukakis was entrusting the personal safety of any number of ordinary people to the sense of the social responsibility of the most anti-social members of society, convicted sociopaths.

    But there was another aspect of Dukakis' action that was even more repugnant morally. During the 70's, a debate was ongoing in Massachusetts as to whether the death penalty should be re-instituted after the 1971 Supreme Court decision (Furman v. Georgia) that declared it unconstitutional. Not unexpectedly, Dukakis opposed the reenactment of death penalty. That opposition took the form of assuring the Massachusetts public that murderers who might otherwise be condemned would be confined for  life.  Simultaneously with these representations, the Dukakis Administration was aggressively insisting on work furlough privileges for the exact same inmates.

    So in addition to a mind boggling reversal of values, Dukakis was cynically breaching a fairly serious promise made to the Massachusetts public. Even if there had never been a scandal, if there were no Willie Horton, this outrageously highhanded course of conduct would have a serious bearing on his fitness for the Presidency. In my personal view (I have been a practitioner of criminal law for more than 30 years, both as public defender and prosecutor), it is absolutely disqualifying.

    But as it happened, it was Horton who ripped the veil off the whole charade. He had been imprisoned in 1974 for the savage murder of a 17 year old delivery boy, stabbed 19 times and left in a garbage can to bleed to death. But, not wanting to cut the heart out of his rehabilitation, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts on June 6, 1986, granted him the privilege of a weekend furlough. Horton may have been a sociopathic murderer, but he was no fool. He seized his opportunity for freedom, and fled to Maryland. Since of course he could not re-enter society on any normal terms, he remained at large. On April 3, 1987, he confronted Clifford Barnes in his own home, pistol whipped him, and stabbed him 22 times. When Barne's fiance came home, he raped her twice, then fled in Barnes car. He was arrested, tried and convicted . On October 22, 1987, he was sentenced to life in a Maryland prison, a sentence he is serving as of the time of this writing.

    That same month the Reader's Digest published an article on the Horton affair, and the incident became a small, but national, scandal. Horton was not the only escapee from the Massachusetts work furlough program - there were more than 80 - but he was far and away the most spectacular recidivist. Nonetheless, despite the negative publicity and social concern, Dukakis and his administration continued to defend the program relentlessly, reiterating that it was 'necessary for efficient prison administration'. It was only in  April, 1988, not coincidentally at about the same time Dukakis began his presidential run, that the Massachusetts work furlough program was finally reformed.

    Al Gore was the first to confront Dukakis with the Horton incident. But it was not until the autumn, after Dukakis had become the Democratic nominee, that the matter changed from a small scandal into a large one. After reactions in focus groups showed that the issue was so powerful that it changed the minds of committed Dukakis voters, the Bush campaign publicized it widely, most notably in two television ads. The first, run by one a Republican political action committee, showed Horton's mug shot and arrest photograph. The second was far more widely seen, and featured about 30 actors (two Hispanic, three African American, the rest White) going through a revolving door ad with a voice-over that described the differences between Bush and Dukakis on hard crime. Both can be seen on You Tube.

    The Main Stream Media reacted to these ads quickly and unanimously, denouncing . . . Bush . . .  for appealing to  the supposedly racist fears of suburban White America. Bush was allegedly trying to stampede the electorate with the specter of Dukakis unleashing a horde of Black criminals in suburbia'.  That perspective solidified into Conventional Wisdom within days, and became Settled History within weeks. Read any main stream account you like about the 1988 campaign and you find a denunciation of the racist tactics of Bush and his dark angel, Lee Atwater. The extent to what that focus group may have been responding to an issue of real substance, and Bush quite appropriately communicating that concern to the voters at large, is almost never mentioned.

    Neither ad nor issue was at all racist. I hate to go Greek on my readership, but we do have to journey back to Aristotle-land at this point. The substance of the matter was Dukakis' irresponsibility in granting work furlough to dangerous inmates. The accident was that the inmate who demonstrated emphatically how irresponsible the policy was happened to be Black. (There were White esscapees, but none committed such a violent offense when at liberty.) A little thought experiment - suppose Horton was in prison for a less violent crime, say drug sales or a property crime, granted work furlough, and committed the same new offense - a Black criminal 'unleashed on suburbia', but without the violent past. Even assuming that an ad decrying the event were even run (unlikely), does it change a single vote? Criminals of every race are paroled all the time, and it is the unfortunate fact that many commit new, even more serious crimes. Such an ad would be laughable - no campaign would spend the money for it. The meat on the table - the substance - was Horton's life term for a conviction of first degree murder.

    Turn the issue around - suppose Dukakis had reacted to the irrelevant issue of Horton's race. He takes the podium and angrily insists that he is not an unleasher of Black violent criminals upon suburbia, that he is an equal opportunity unleasher of violent criminals of ALL races. Not exactly an effective riposte, is it? It is no wonder Dukakis never made it. But he didn't have to say anything. The media did it for him.

    Why this instant and thoughtless rejection of an extremely serious issue concerning Dukakis? I think there were two reasons. The first has at least some plausibility. The unfortunate statistical fact is that the vast majority of negative political ads of both parties are grossly unfair, and should be viewed warily and skeptically. However, these particular ads were the rule-proving exception, summarizing in an icily concise 30 seconds a real concern relative to Dukakis' moral values.  However understandable the initial skepticism, the Media owed the American public some hard thought about the real issues in play.

    The second is more cynical. Then as now, the Media was composed largely of Democrats sympathetic to liberal causes. Although Reagan had governed effectively for eight years - how effectively would not be known until the early 90's - it  passionately wanted a Democratic president. In truth, no focus group was needed to show how devastating Dukakis' defense of this absolutely bizarre work furlough policy was to his chances. In my view, it was completely disqualifying. The American public ultimately shared that view.

    So the potentially lethal stroke had to be parried if Dukakis was to have any chance at all. The accident of Horton's race, an absolute irrelevancy, was thus transformed into the major talking point. The thrust at the jugular was thereyby diverted into a cut on the capillary. Dukakis never had to explain - directly - why he had taken the positions he did on prison policy in Massachusetts. To the best of my knowledge, to this day, he never has. An abject apology, and perhaps even monetary compensation was due Clifford Barnes and his fiance. It never came.

    But in the end, rough justice was done. Bernard Shaw, the CNN anchor, opened the second Presidential debate, with perhaps the bluntest question ever posed in that forum (also the most meaningful) - how Dukakis would react if he came home and found his wife murdered. I don't know the first thing about Shaw's politics, but he was a responsible reporter. Also, being African-American, he may have had a little less concern about being perceived as racist. In any case, there, in response, in front of the entire world, Dukakis exhibited the same baffling indifference to criminal violence he had shown as Governor of Massachusetts for 12 years. His already troubled campaign was doomed.

    In the genial forum in which I normally discuss these and other issues, one of the more conservative posters, who normally is sympathetic to me, expressed his sharp disagreement with the propriety of Shaw's question. He was appalled in 1988 and still outraged 20 years later. I would agree with him if the same question had been put to any other candidate in any other campaign - even candidates whom I heartily dislike. But it was a meaningful question to Michael Dukakis. He deserved it. Clifford Barnes and millions like him deserved an answer. Willie Horton had seen to that.

    The whole saga is one worth revisiting in this March of 2008. We are entering into a campaign that is a hundredfold more heated than the one in 1988.  One candidate in the field is far more glamorous than Dukakis could ever hoped to be. There are all kinds of way in which the MSM protects its darlings. How it will do so in this case remains to be seen.

    The one certainty is that it will, somehow.

   

Where the Hell Do You Put the Gas Tank?: or, Thinking Clearly About Iraq

    War, as William Tecumseh Sherman famously said, is hell. I'll go further - war is intrinsically evil. So far from resenting the opposition to the Iraqi War in concept, I respect it. War as a policy choice in a democratic society should always be regarded with deep, dark suspicion.  The notion of dispensable people, 'cannon fodder', eggs for omelets, and all the rest, are almost the touchstone, the authentic signature, of a totalitarian state - whether you can its head king, kaiser, fuhrer, or comrade secretary.

    But to state categorically that war is intrinsically evil is not to say that it is intrinsically the greater evil. The bumper sticker cliché that 'war is dangerous to children and other living things' is absolutely true. But peace can be dangerous, too, as the children of Rwanda, of Cambodia, of Bosnia, of pre-World War II Europe, of Bosnia, could tell you. There are dangers in letting loose the dogs of war, always and everywhere, no argument. But there are also dangers in placating despots and in appeasement. You can go as badly wrong with peace as with war. This is possibly the saddest commentary on human history that I can state.

    What has galled me for some time about the Demented Left is that it seems completely blind to this rather elementary analytical framework. The only way to think sensibly about the decisions as momentous as these is to make some rational, decently intelligent assumptions about the way history would unfold if there had been no invasion of Iraq, decide in some logical way which course of action produces the lesser evil, and come to the appropriate conclusion. If any member of the mainstream media ever did that, I'd respect the process, even if I disagreed with the analysis.

    But that is not the way the war opponents behave. There is no comparison of alternatives, there is no attempt to judge whether the world is better or worse off for what happened five years ago. Instead - until recently, when the situation in Iraq began to up tick and the silence suddenly became deafening - there has been vehement, shrieking, hysterical denunciation - as if the evils of this course of action were the only evils, as if there were not serious and even greater risks in NOT acting. Of course, lives have been lost, of course there has been a huge human cost - and every one of those lives, every  iota of that cost, matters. But that does not mean that the War was the greater evil. In the world that never came to be, the human cost, the loss of life, might have been incalculably greater.

    I will descend to a loose analogy. An automobile designer has to make a decision as to where to put the gas tank - that is, the 12 plus gallon firebomb designed into every car. No matter where it is place, particular individuals are going to die because of the placement. If the cannister were only two inches forward (or back, or here or there), the worst sort of tort lawyer pontificates, that child would be alive. True enough - but there are numberless other children, not present in the courtroom, alive and well because the tank was place where it was. It requires a deliberate act of intuitive imagination to conjure them up - one that most of us can accomplish, given the cue and impetus.

    Exactly the same sort of intuitive imagination is required to think clearly about Iraq. There are thousands of persons who are dead or maimed because the invasion took place. These we know, and count, and mourn. The issue is whether there are a much greater number of persons alive and well (or who will remain alive and well over the next few decades). This is the process the Demented Left deliberately refuses to undertake - for to do so implies that the War was one alternative among others, with costs and benefits that could be, and had to be, calculated. Admitting this prosaic fact would deprive it of its shrill, moralizing voice. That is the self-serving reason clear thought is  anathema to it. 

    Being sensitive to the real human cost of the War does not mean melting into a pool of limpid, insipid  sentimental pathos. A year or so back, I picked up a truly priceless book, "The New Yorker Book of War Pieces" (ISBN 00805209018). It is a collection of the real time journalism that appeared in the New Yorker between 1939 and 1945 - 'Letter from London', 'Letter from Paris', 'Letter from Warsaw', and so forth. These days the New Yorker is heavily politicized, but there is nothing political at all about these pieces. They are contemporary journalistic reports, written to describe in great depth the emotions and reactions of the people of those cities to events in real time. Neither the population they observed, nor the writers themselves, all of whom are very gifted, could know that Hitler would batter his army to pieces in the Soviet Union, that the United States would ultimately enter the war with decisive effect, that all would end happily - at least for the survivors. That real time ignorance is what makes the collection priceless.

    What jumps out in the early pieces, written in London and Paris in the first two years of the war, is how frustrated the public in Western Europe was, that Western leadership had allowed the momentum of Nazi Germany to develop into such a towering, apparently irresistible, force by 1939. This of course is a historical cliché these days, but it is interesting to read it described by journalists who - beneath all their professionalism - were genuinely afraid, for themselves, for their friends, for their nations, for the world. The articles do not contained the studied judgment of history, but the real immediate anguish of intelligent people who agonized that the civilization they knew and loved might be endangered by the short-sightedness of English and French political leadership in the late 30's. They agonized, even though they did not know anything then of how barbaric the Nazi regime would actually prove to be.

    Interesting reading - but to me it brought clearly to mind the essential temporal paradox in intuiting the direction of the path not taken. If the prime ministers of England and France (specifically Stanley Baldwin and your choice of one of five or six French heads of state) had reacted to Hitler's initial acts of aggression in 1935 with the force that everyone now agrees they should have, then the time track in which the wisdom of that use of force is clear would never come to be. The statesmen would not have been praised. They would have been vilified, attacked, denounced, damned. The temper of those times was even more pacifistic than these, and with more reason. Over one million students around the world signed a pledge not to bear arms for their country in 1935. The utterly senseless slaughters of the Great War, the true cause of most of the misery of the last Century, lay only two decades back in the past,

    So the mainstream media of that day - the Keith Olbermans, Paul Krugmans, the editors of the New York Times - would almost certainly attacked that leadership with the same venomous hatred we see expressed these days. Hitler was no threat - he had disavowed the claims in Mein Kampf when he assumed power (which is true), his actions were only a fully justified attempt to rectify the imbalance of the Versailles Treaty (also true). Look at this needless loss of life - in the dozens, perhaps the hundreds! This unnecessary disorder! This leadership should be dismissed - or worse!

    Yet the war that would have been dangerous to living things, did not commence in 1935, and a peace that proved to be far more dangerous continued. In 1940, the same intellectuals who would have sneered at an earlier, timely intervention, feared for the existence of their community and their lives, and denounced Baldwin, Chamberlain, and the others for their myopia. Such is it always on the editorial pages.

    (I can't write like this article and duck the implicit challenge. It's my own belief that Bush and Blair chose the least of the evils, and here are the reasons. If there is no invasion of Iraq, the enlightened self-interest of both Hussein and Osama Bin Laden leads to Al Quaeda seeking sanctuary in Iraq, or some affiliated safe haven in the Mid East. There had been discussions between the factions as early as 1998 - their enmity  was only skin deep.  Bin Laden would retain his mythic, invulnerable status, Hussein would gain among fundamentalists by the alliance. They would also both be confident that they could act without any fear of consequence, because the West would once again have demonstrated its pusillanimity. Hussein would be free to continue seeking WMD, which he would have every chance of obtaining in an open ended time frame. He would have at his disposal a well-financed and intact distribution mechanism in Al Quaeda. The support the US has garnered for the war against terrorism would not be nearly so significant, because of its own failure to walk the walk.

    The world, in short, would be a much more dangerous place than it is. Just one man's opinion - it may be wrong, but it is not irrational. I say this fully knowing how much this war has cost men and women who deserved much better from life. The fault lies with Saddam Hussein, Osama Bin Laden, and the others who preach and practice religious warfare. But a fat lot of good assigning blame does for dead soldiers. I will not dismiss our honored dead and the others as cannon fodder, necessary sacrifices. Yet I do believe they have not died in vain.)

    Can it be that Bush and Blair are martyrs to a history that never happened? Saviors without honor in the land of might-have-been? I do believe it is certainly possible. For the reasons given above, I believe it is a fact.  But I have to say that is only my belief. The automobile designer at least has collision studies, historical data, test runs. A policy maker has only insight, intelligence, and intuition.   There are simply too many human and random factors involved to say with any definite certitude, with respect to a decision as far reaching as invading Iraq, which is better or worse. No responsible person can plausibly claim to know for sure. Like it or not, the debate has to end in some sort of conjecture.

    But that said, it is possible to insist on rational assumptions, and a logical approach to the issue, rather than a simple reiteration of pre-existing value judgments. My complaint with the vast majority of war opponents is that they limit themselves to bemoaning the present situation, without even considering the thought that there were negatives in the alternatives. It is not that I disagree with their thinking. It is that they don't think at all.