Thursday, July 17, 2008

Being Right on Iraq

Jame Plunkett is had a story about a politician who got too interested in fancy clothes, a cardinal error in Plunkett's estimation. The story proved the deadliness of the error because one day the young politician was hit by a bus and died.

That is a funny story. we recognize it as funny because of the principle correlation does not equal causation (as well as the post hoc ergo procter hoc fallacy). It is true that the young man's demise followed on his burgeoning obsession with clothes, but there is obviously no causal relation.

The same thing could be said of many of the arguments that the left uses against Iraq. It is true that a lot of bad things have happened since the invasion of Iraq by the US, but the causal mechanisms of those maladies are either unrelated to the ones the left warned us about or at odds with the left's warnings.

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