Joel Thomas, one of my commenters, makes a good point. The War on Terror will make us safer in the long run, but in the short run it might make life more dangerous. Even if our safety level does not increase monotonically we'll be better off in the long-run for having defeated terror than we would have been if we had endured the status quo ante forever.
This argument undermines the the second half of the combined claim that (a) attacking Iraq incited more world terrorism and (b) that such incitement is bad and demonstrates that we shouldn't have attacked Iraq. (a) may be true, but even if it is it doesn't necessarily follow that (b) is true. The goal of the War on Terror is to reduce the long-term threat level, even if we have to make intermediate sacrifices towards that end.
Since there's no real way to know what the long-term effects of the status quo ante would have been, it's impossible to prove or disprove (b). (b) becomes intangible, even if (a) can be numerically demonstrated.
Following your argument, I'll assume that is impossible to prove (b) because (c) "there's no real way to know what the long-term effects of the status quo ante would have been." If we don't know what the base-line threat level would have been (if we had done nothing), it seems reasonable to think that we couldn't know if the threat level increased over the long run. If we don't know what it would have been, we can't know if it increased.
However, wouldn't it also be impossible to prove that (d) invading Iraq reduces the long term threat level, for the same reason? If we don't know what it would have been, we can't know if it decreased, right?
If this is the case, isn't it impossible then to know what the long term effects of doing or not doing any action in the war on terrorism?
I'll agree that we don't know with anything close to certainty what WOULD HAVE happened if we would have done nothing after 9/11 or if we had not invaded Iraq. That being said, we will almost never know what would have happened, so we must estimate and guess to the best of our ability.
A friend told me that any claims about Iraqi lives saved due to the end of Saddam's reign are worthless, since we don't know that people would have kept dying or being killed under the Baathist regime. This is just plain silly. Any reasonable person can clearly see that people would not have suddenly stopped dying for unnatural reasons under Saddam, and though we don't know how many, I believe that there is value in trying to estimate the numbers.
How do we know that Nazi Germany would have directly threatened the US in the 1940s if we hadn't supported Britain or declared war? For all we KNOW, we didn't need to fight the Germans. But it sure seemed pretty obvious at the time, didn't it?
As for attacks increasing in the short run but safety improving in the long run, I'll whip out another WW2 analogy. Of course it isn't perfect. But what if we had withdrawn from the eastern and southern Pacific after Pearl Harbor? Japan might have been content to keep its gains from the first few months and left us alone. By declaring war and contesting their control of the Pacific, we paid a very steep price in blood and gold in the short term. Might those lives have been saved if we simply let Imperial Japan keep what it took? How about in the long run? Would the world be a safer place if we had done so?
We obviously cannot predict the future, but some things seem clear and others can be estimated pretty fairly. We take our BEST GUESS about the unknown and make our decisions based upon that. And I don't think we're doing too badly, either.
Hi Murdoc,
Very good point--I agree with your assessment. All we can do is take an estimate, and there is nothing wrong with doing so. However, I still hold that Michael's argument doesn't make any side of the argument harder to prove than the other.
Dast: Exactly right, whereas many leftists have built their arguments as if (b) necessarily follows from (a). Since it doesn't, their arguments fall apart.
Michael: Why the focus on leftists here? Your logic applies to anyone who makes any claim about reducing or increasing the threat level from doing or not doing anything. If we accept your logic, nobody can propose or critique anything...
It seems to me that in order to make any progress, we have to accept Murdoc's statement that the best we can do is an estimate. And we can certainly estimate that the threat level increased in the long run due to the war on Iraq (or decreased for that matter). And just because it is an estimate doesn't mean it isn't useful. What is important is how the estimate is backed up.
More importantly than any of this, it seems dangerous to argue against a vague group (leftists) with a nebulous argument. Who specifically made this argument that is falling apart?
Anyway, thanks for the thought provoking post, Michael.
Dast: Consider the Spanish who voted to put the Socialists in power, at least partially because of the recent train bombings.
I wasn't responding to any particular assertion, just the general sort of argument I hear from my friends who opposed the war.