So — and this is the message that no President could ever tell the American people — it’s a trade-off: Dozens or perhaps hundreds of American and other Western casualties rather than thousands of killed and maimed U.S. and allied troops and billions more spent in a new ground and air war with no guarantee of success. What’s more, intensified war in the Middle East would inevitably trigger more home front attacks rather than prevent them.Which leads Matthew Yglesias to remark, apparently approvingly, "In this way, the hardest problem in US counterterrorism policy is in some ways as much a speechwriting challenge as anything else."
Who Is Being Sacrificed?
On a piece about "Obama's Sacrifice," we learn that the President is sacrificing the peace of the West to protect American soldiers.
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I suppose from a utilitarian point of view you could make an argument for doing nothing. Assuming you can make sure a big terrorist event like 9/11 does not happen again. I can not imagine it would ever be popular if laid out in terms of pure cost benefit that a citizen is a citizen, and that if you are going to lose more soldiers than you save from terrorist attacks what is the point? Especially given the extra expense of deploying forces.
Well, you put your finger on the problem with utilitarian arguments when you say "Assuming you can make sure...". You can't, of course. Utilitarian arguments are incoherent philosophically because they base moral calculation on future outcomes that are totally uncertain, where the truth of the future is often even unimaginable.
That's a general problem for political decision making, which is of course often interested in future outcomes. However, it's a special problem for utilitarianism because the future outcomes are the sole thing to be considered according to that model.
Utilitarianism strikes me as a general evil philosophy wrapped up in the guise of a "greater good". I say "evil" because it is explicitly designed under the assumption that you are generally ok to take actions that lead to the loss of life, liberty, or property of others so long as the desired outcome is to the benefit of many others. That would be bad enough, but as Grim points out, predicting a future outcome is "problematic" at best, and most frequently completely unknowable. Thus, those who claim utilitarianism as justification for their acts aren't even able to point to concrete outcomes to the positive, we simply have to trust their intentions. And last I checked, the road to Hell was paved with those.
The "thinking", on this, if I may use so generous a term, is that by some mysterious equation the deaths will be greater among our troops overseas than among the innocent they protect at home. Takes but one WMD to toss that argument on it's head.
True. From my perspective, though, the greater error is to misunderstand the function of a soldier. You don't protect your soldiers by sacrificing civilians for them. They volunteered for the honor of assuming the risk, and trained intensely for that task.
What a load of malarkey (Yglesias). Incroyable...
I read a PJ O'Rourke argument 8-10 years ago arguing that nations which appear to be strong and vigorous do not get attacked; but a growing economy works as well as warfare for that. The tribal extremists who embraced Islam have been very open in their assessment that Americans can be waited-out in warfare. Historically, that is true: Americans can go about three years, then they want out, whether winning or losing. It takes enormous effort and political capital at that point to keep the waverers on task for just a bit longer. (See, for example, Copperheads, Yalta, The Surge, Vietnam ramp-up 1965 and loss of support '68)
I'm not opposed to that as a foreign policy built on domestic policy: economic energy punctuated by brief, punitive, warfare as needed. Everyone wins, including our enemies, who get their worst leaders eliminated without enormous drains on the economy. I hesitate to even mention it however, because it isn't going to happen, and thus deludes us into chasing after starlight. There are simply too many ways that a president and ruling party could be attacked in the PR battles, overt and subtle.
But damn, it could work.
Slightly off-topic: an acquaintance on Facebook posted a picture of Pres. Obama with a caption something like, "All he did was save the United States in the face of unprecedented racism and disrespect." I didn't bother commenting, mostly because I happen to know she has a terminal illness and I don't feel like arguing with her, but I'm really puzzled what she has in mind in terms of him saving the country.
"In this way, the hardest problem in US counterterrorism policy is in some ways as much a speechwriting challenge as anything else."
I do believe that's how Obama sees it, although I doubt it is true.
M Y is a Leftist first and foremost.
Falling into the trap of believing in and debating Leftist propaganda, is the first pit fall people fall into but think they didn't.
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