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November 30, 2005

Confused Americans for Truth - Hopelessness as a Substitute for Planning

by Ferdinand T Cat

I am always ambivalent about responding to a comment with an article, because I don't want people who leave comments here to feel as if they are being held up for ridicule. Nonetheless, when it comes to the Iraq war, the comments we've had here often reveal important patterns in liberal thought that need to be brought into the light so they can be corrected.

The following is excerpted from a comment written by "Dr. Goo" in response to Who Do These American Soldiers Think They Are?

Stop when things go wrong? Heavens no, let's just push harder. Things are going badly, we're alienating ourselves from the rest of the world, more Americans are being killed weekly, Iraqis are being tortured by AMERICAN led Iraqi forces (not to mention the torture offered by the Americans...) but by God we're not going to stop. That would send the wrong signal to the enemy.

Ok, here's the signal. We screwed up. We're still screwing up. And apparently we're going to keep screwing up.

The technique being used here does not have a common name, but I call it Appeal to Hopeleness: the job is impossible, so we should quit. There is nothing wrong with an impossible job, but we have to ask ourselves, why is impossibility the dominant argument? Why aren't there more people saying that the war is too costly instead of impossible to win? Why are reports like this and this and this and this and this and this and this having no effect on public opinion?

The answer is that hopelessness itself provides a powerful benefit: it removes the stigma from failure. It is always possible to create failure, but success requires planning, perserverance, and the ability to accept risk.

Most government policies operate safely out of the public eye. There will always be people who claim that welfare is causing an increase in the crime rate, but the connection is tenuous enough that if we don't think about it, we don't have to deal with it. War is completely different. It takes place in the foreground of everybody's mind, and the only way to guarantee a stop date is to rule out the possibility of victory.

I find it ironic that we are constantly told about our PR problem in Iraq, but the fact that the military is trying to do something about it has caused in uproar. We are told that this is not the kind of war we have fought in the past, but it doesn't matter that we are using new techniques to fight it, including technology not available in previous wars and modifying our strategy with things like embedded troops to accelerate the Iraqi sense of their own involvement in the victory. Even if we are losing (a contention with which I disagree), we are adapting to meet the problems. We are not simply dumping ever-larger numbers of men into a bottomless pit.

I guarantee you that all this evidence and all these arguments will be considered irrelevant to the big picture of an inevitable defeat. That big picture is unassailable because it is the only way to guarantee that the war will be over. Then we can go back to being peaceful nice guys who don't need to worry about the meanies who want to kill us.

You can see why people would want to think that way.

Respectfully submitted,

Ferdinand T. Cat

Trackposted to Is It Just Me?, NIF, Oblogatory Anecdotes, Right Wing Nation, MacStansbury.org, Jo's Cafe, Basil's Blog, and the unnamed sources who do so much to shape our daily picture of the world without anybody knowing who they are.

# At Wed 11:38 PM | Permalink | Trackback URI | Comments (3) | More Confused Americans for Truth

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Comments

I am even offended at the thought that we would be thought of as not winning. we are winning. PR? definitely not...but on the ground? easily, through the hard work of people who are obviously not in it for the money.


Posted by: MacStansbury Author Profile Page at December 1, 2005 12:07 AM

Excellent post Cat, and thanks.


Posted by: LindaSoG Author Profile Page at December 1, 2005 7:01 PM

Thank you for a pair of excellent posts. By all accounts, our soldiers are slowly but surely winning the hearts and minds of Iraqis ... while the terrorists are losing them.

It has been interesting for me to compare the reaction in the Muslim world to the Danish cartoons with the reaction to our moment of shame at Abu Ghraib. The outrage over the latter was strongest here at home and in the rest of the west. The Muslim world does not expect "humane" treatment for prisoners ... in fact, humane treatment is taken as a sign of weakness.


Posted by: Well_Seasoned at February 17, 2006 7:03 PM

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