Iraq, and Character Analysis

Me and Howard Dean: strange bedfellows? My response:

You distort my position. Firstly, I can hardly be against a constitution that has yet to be written and ratified. I can only be against contingencies. The contingency that would cause me to proclaim Iraq a failure is Sharia being codified into the new constitution. A limited argument.

Let's call Sharia black, and liberal democracy white. There are many shades of gray in between that would be acceptable. I believe we will see gray, I just hope it drifts towards the lighter side. But if it doesn't, I will not hesitate to call an Islamist society with vast oil reserves a danger, and an American policy failure.


And let me jump into this debate between Truepeers and Ash. It seems that we have different levels of argument working here, with TP going back and forth between the practical and the anthropological, and Ash firmly planting his flag in the abstract, with occasional nods towards reality.

To make a practical claim, I would have Ash compute and divulge what he sees as the possible consequences of his argument, in the real world. Putting perspective analysis aside, what possible good comes from the Mullahs having the bomb, and what possible evil?

Also, the idea of character has been lost somewhere in Ash's analysis. Two nations are equivalent in many areas: they are sovereign, made of people, and have needs and desires, etc. Yet these same two nations can be quite different in character. Ash wants to peg the privilege of nuclear weapons to the legal idea of sovereignty, which means every nation has a claim as a matter of right, and there is no way to distinguish one nation from the other in this respect.

Truepeers (if I am not misstating his argument) and I are arguing that the unique nature of nuclear weapons--unparalleled destructive power in an individual and portable device--should force us to limit the privilege of ownership. If one accepts this premise, that we must limit ownership of nuclear weapons, the argument from sovereignty is invalid, a priori. And so we look for a way to distinguish between nations.

Character is the most intuitive choice for a limiting filter, and this goes back to Charles Manson's knife. The Mullah's are not shy about their stance on Israel, and readily proclaim their contempt and hatred for America. They are also not shy about infiltrating Iraq and killing our troops.

Since we cannot know the mind of our enemy as it truly exists, we must use his actions and words as our evidence of his character and our insight into his intentions. In law this is the "eye in the sky" approach. A contract, in the abstract, is created by a meeting of the minds, but in a court of law it is only created by the actions and words of the parties. We may be wrong about the real intentions of the Mullahs, but our limit as human beings forces us to rely solely on their outward conduct as we try to determine their character. And their character determines the level of threat.

And to preempt any vacillation or equivocation, character must be judged from an American perspective. Abstract works until it doesn't, but reality works all the time. We are not simply impartial observers to this international crisis, and it is as Americans that we will feel the consequences of any misapplication of reason.

After taking this all into account, it is clear we cannot allow the Mullahs to have nuclear weapons. They are not politically mature enough to play nice with, or even be trusted not to not cause a wholesale slaughter of, the other kids in the playground. We have studied their character, and we have found it lacking.