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#1
11-01-07, 12:48 PM
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War in Iraq - stannard67 vs patio11
Resolution:
The war in Iraq is justified Patrick McKenzie (patio11) - Affirmative Matthew Stannard (stannard67) - Negative Judges: Mike Dorsi (Mike_Cal'06) Andrew Hoag (andrewthepirate) Alan Tauber (Alan) Moderator: Jake Lewis (skibum) Rules: Aff Constructive 1: 3200 word maximum. CX: Up to 10 questions with total word count not exceeding 400 words. The total word count of all responses may not exceed 600 words. Neg Constructive 1: 3200 word maximum. CX: Format as above. Aff Constructive 2: 3200 word maximum. Neg Constructive 2/Rebuttal: 4000 word maximum. Aff Rebuttal: 1400 word maximum. 1 - Each speech should be posted within 72 hours of the prior speech's posting time. 2 - Each debater may have one 24 hour extension if they need it. 3 - Use of evidence is allowed to establish points of fact, though not to make appeals to authority for normative arguments. (Full citations required at the end of any post using such evidence. These citations would not count against word count.) 4 - Editing of messages more than 20 minutes after their original posting is not allowed and will result in deletion of the messages. 5 - Debaters are free to obtain outside assistance for research, but must write their arguments themselves. 6 - No one other than the debaters and the moderator may post on this thread until the debate is over, except by instruction of the moderator. (NB Mods & Admins, if someone else does post in this thread - please summarily delete said post upon sight - thanks!) Mr. McKenzie, your first speech is due by sometime this Sunday. J Last edited by skibum : 11-01-07 at 01:00 PM. 
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#2
11-06-07, 08:28 AM
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You can’t see the crater anymore. The farmers plowed the field three days after the bomb hit – food was scarce, what with the war and all, and they couldn’t afford to lose the crop to superstition or sentimentality. The only evidence left by the bomb is a stone, shaded under the leaves of a nearby tree.
There are six names written on the stone – one for each member of the family that was working the field when the bomb hit. They ranged from a rather old grandfather (probably in his early fifties) to a daughter, who died strapped to her mother’s back. Underneath their names the stonemason has scrawled their epitaph: “Why? Why? Why?” There are many Answers to that question. One simple one is “They are dead because the Americans have killed them”, and it is indisputably true. It isn’t the whole of the truth, though, and while it is an Answer it doesn’t amount to a Reason, and surely the dead deserve no less. There are many Reasons, too, some more true than others. If you look past the tree, across the field, one Reason is the ramshackle building with billowing white smoke rising from its chimney. If you asked one of the locals what that building was, they would tell you it is a bicycle factory. And if you asked them what it once was, their voice might catch for just an instant, and then they would say it has always been just a bicycle factory. This country is full of buildings which have always been just a bicycle factory, prisons which have always housed only criminals, and graves which have always sheltered only the victims of famine and old age. It is considered ill-mannered to mention such things in front of the graves of the indisputably innocent, though, so let us agree that it was always just a bicycle factory. So there are two Reasons here: first, the Americans thought the bicycle factory to be producing pipe bombs, and second, that the plane they sent to destroy the bicycle factory missed by some fifteen yards and hit the field beside it. But these Reasons do not satisfy. What Reason launched the fleet that loosed the plane that dropped the bomb that missed the bicycle factory? There are many Reasons, but they are far removed from this field in time and place, so let us pay our respects and leave. The war between America and this nation was a long time in coming, which would have surprised most observers only a few years before. Back then we were buxom buddies, locked in combat with a common enemy. The United States trained a good portion of the officers corps it eventually ended up fighting in the war, and more than a few Americans were killed with weapons other Americans had created to be sold to their earstwhile allies. But we had an extended falling out. Influential leaders in both American political parties had been quietly agitating for a war for years. There are a few Reasons which could be given here – America’s once-upon-a-time ally was governed by a brutal dictatorship (not much new about that, truth be told), and aside from governing through terror at home it waged a number of brutal campaigns against its neighbors. Some of their neighbors were client states of America and her (closer, whiter) allies, so one could say (and many have said – not all disapprovingly) that American imperial ambition required her to bring her former protégé into line. There was also oil – huge flowing rivers of it – on the line, and the demand for it by industries in America and worldwide was insatiable. Many have suggested, and I’d be hard-pressed to disagree, that more than a little of the jingoism was driven by racism. European nations got away with similar or worse conduct on a regular basis, but they weren’t hated for it nearly so much. The American public, however, was tired of being the global supercop. They were absorbed in their own issues at home, and thought the international community could sort out these petty skirmishes in the land of Far, Far Away. That all changed one morning, when a few thousand Americans died in an attack orchestrated by a man who, if you squinted a bit, might have resembled someone in the farmer’s extended family. Americans remember that as the day the world changed. The public got the war that they demanded and that the Administration had been planning for years. The war which killed the farmer’s family came a few years later, as a matter of fact, but it scratched another name off the enemy list. (Interestingly, the friends list ranged from reliable old Britain to dictators so evil the Devil might not let them into Hell, but the US was willing to compromise as long as you picked the right side). All of these are Reasons, and all of these Reasons are true. But they are not the whole of the truth, not all of the story. The war which killed the farmer’s family, and caused a million other tragedies besides, was a just one. It was fought by men both monstrous and noble, in manners both inhuman and civilized, and for Reasons foul and fair. The good Reasons are so widely understood I won’t bore you by reciting them here. Mr. Stannard and I can agree that the good Reasons for this war far outweigh the bad ones. That is because the worn stone marking the deaths of the farmer’s family rests, not in Basra or Baghdad, but in Mie, Japan. There are stones like it scattered across Japan, Germany, and now Iraq, powerful reminders that war is a terrible thing. The rest of this speech will, hopefully, remind you that there are Reasons why “peace” can be terrible, too. Cue The Intro! Hiya, everyone, thank you for reading this far. I want to particularly thank Mr. Stannard and his argumentation class. I apologize in advance for making an absolute hash of your final examination. Many members of the Parli community have by now picked up on the fact that this is not going to be a highly technical, “traditional” Parli round. I have nothing against highly technical Parli rounds, indeed I actually love them. However, in the interests of having this round be more accessible, I thought I would fall back to basics and just make arguments. We can save the intricate ballet of bullet points for another day. Here is another radical idea: I’m going to dispense with pretending that you judges have the intelligence of goldfish, and that you popped into being just in time for me to write you a sixty-word bastardization of a highly-involved philosophical theory and call it “a criteria”. “Just war theory means vote for the war that is more just! Juuuuuudge!”. I trust your judgment, in the most literal sense. If you are persuaded by my arguments above and my arguments soon to come that the Iraq war is just, vote for me. If you aren’t, vote for Stannard. I am not going to make an argumentative tapestry by rending it into isolated threads. People who claim to are always hiding a spool or three, anyhow. That thousand-word introduction, for example – is it a criteria? Is it a framework? Is it a criticism? It is a narrative? What does it mean? It is what it is and it means what it means. In addition to that, I’ve got three big Reasons why the Iraq war was necessary. To Fix Prior Wrongs As alluded to earlier, the United States has not had totally clean hands in its dealings with Iraq. We backed Iraq in their war with Iran to stem off Islamic clericalism and deny the Soviet Union a foothold in the Middle East. Then we went to war with Iraq to kick them out of Kuwait. At the end of that war, we knew Saddam Hussein was one grade-A bad guy, but were not quite willing to pay the price in blood and treasure to depose him and rebuild the nation. So we settled for containing him. This was, in hindsight, a great evil born of good intentions. The containment was based on a very flawed understanding of what the threat from Iraq was. We believed Saddam to be a generic evil dictator straight out of central casting. We thought he maintained power through his Republican Guard and secret police and concentrated it in his Baath Party, that he was a persistent threat to his neighbors with territorial ambitions, and that at home he was a right bastard, something like a bloodier Pinochet or Castro. We greatly underestimated Saddam’s competence and the degree to which Iraq was not merely a dictatorship but a genocidal apartheid state. The well-intentioned moves we made to isolate Saddam made things even worse. The first big flop was our half-hearted backing of the uprising against Saddam, which we abandoned after it became clear there was no political will to send the Armed Forces back to nation-build. That decision got a lot of Iraqis killed and poisoned the well against us for years. We still have issues with cooperation because people remember what happened to “collaborators” last time. There was limited understanding of why exactly there was an uprising. “Saddam is a right bastard, of course people want him gone”, many folks thought. We largely missed the significance of the uprising being centered in the Kurdish north and Iraq’s Shia-majority southern promises, away from Saddam’s stronghold in what has since been dubbed the Sunni Triangle. Most American policymakers at the time would have been hard pressed to tell you the difference between the two – and I am not entirely sure that has changed. But regardless, we put up a no-fly zone across the north and south ends of the country, and for the next 14 years we bombed Iraqi forces on a weekly basis to enforce it. (One might ask why this was not called a war. I think the answer is that “war”, in the American imagination, describes a state of affairs in which Americans are dying. It probably looked substantially more like a war to the folks who lived next to Iraqi radar installations. There are stones marking those fields, too.) The other action taken, once “war” was ruled out, was the sanctions. The idea was to use sanctions as chemotherapy – expose the whole body to poison in the hope that the cancer weakens enough to let the healthy cells expel it. The effect was exactly opposite. While they weakened Saddam (and might well have stopped his WMD program), they systematically destroyed sources of power in Iraq which did not flow from the Baath Party. Did you know that Iraq had a thriving trade in domestically-manufactured automobiles and refrigerators up until the first Gulf War, to satisfy its booming middle class? The sanctions took care of that. Dictatorships don’t just collapse – there has to be something to rally around, like the Catholic Church or Solidarity in Poland. However, the economic toll of the sanctions stamped out these sorts of non-governmental powerbases. We saw the sanctions fail, but we didn’t get quite how they were failing. We thought they failed because Iraq was being reduced to starvation. Iraq, which is blessed with extremely fertile soil in the Tigris/Euphrates river delta, did not suffer from famine caused by drought and exacerbated by sanctions. Instead, Saddam deployed famine as a terror weapon against his own people, similar to what the Soviets did in the Ukraine. If your tribe was on Saddam’s good side, as about 40% of Iraq’s population was throughout the putative famine, you had your fill of food. If not, you starved. To the rest of the world, it looked like the Coalition’s fault, but the Iraqis knew the score. (CNN was given what could have been the scoop of the century. A handful of courageous Iraqis told them what was happening during their straight-faced reporting of one of Saddam’s 99% electoral victories. All voters had to bring their ration books with them to the polls, and anyone without a “voted for Saddam” stamp got not rations. CNN ignored the story. Years later, after Saddam was safely out of power, the network’s executive Easton Jordan wrote an op-ed in the New York Times explaining why CNN killed stories like that one. Stories which were critical of the regime were killed to protect CNN’s Iraqi staff and preserve access. That was the price of being able to display “Live from Baghdad”.) Another example of Saddam’s use of starvation as a weapon was his genocidal campaign against the Marsh Arabs, a mostly Shiite people in southern Iraq. Saddam’s army used defoliants to kill their crops and dammed rivers to turn the marshes, and the economy they supported, into deserts. Hundreds of thousand starved or were forced to flee. The marshes, and the culture they supported, are now beginning to recover. Full recovery will take decades. Acting on the perception that the sanctions were killing millions of children (a perception Saddam encouraged by organizing regular parades of coffins throughout Baghdad, the only city international journalists showed sustained attention to then or now), we pushed through the Oil for Food Program. The general idea was that we would permit Saddam to sell a little oil, Iraq would get needed food and medical supplies, the needy would be helped, and Saddam would not increase in power. Oh, how wrong we were. Since lack of food wasn’t the primary cause of the famine, this didn’t decrease suffering in the Shia and Kurdish communities like it should have. It did provide Saddam with extra patronage plums to dole out, though, as the sole source of economic activity in Iraq. And it also let him take over the world, one corrupted official at a time. Had it not been for the war, the sanctions and the repressive system they enabled would continue unchanged to this day. Because We Were The Only Ones Who Could or Would The Oil for Food scam worked like this: Saddam was permitted to sell a certain amount of oil in a year. A voucher entitled you to a particular amount of it. Saddam offered these vouchers to preferred individuals at below their face value. This allowed them to immediately realize vast profits on the sale of the vouchers on the open markets. Saddam then demanded a portion of the profits, delivered off the books. He could then spend that however he liked. Not content with corrupting only one end of the deal, Saddam corrupted the suppliers as well. He had almost total discretion on what vendors to use, something the UN later admitted “was not the best idea, in hindsight”. He paid his favored ones above the market value for the goods he obtained on behalf of the Shia he was starving, then got kickbacks for maintaining the arrangement. The international community was, in essence, paying Saddam to brutalize his own people and simultaneously guaranteeing his monopoly of the economy. 60% of the food supply was Oil For Food, and Saddam controlled every grain of rice. Saddam’s largesse (and the threat of exposure if he was removed) bought him many friends in high places. A short list includes the former French minister of the interior, a senior aide to Putin, several politically influential French companies, and the head of the Oil for Food program itself. Mr. Sevan, for his part, denies the $160,000 payment he received had anything to do with the Program, and maintains that it was a gift from his elderly aunt. She must have a fairly nice pension plan for a civil servant, as per capita GDP in Cyprus is only $23,000. He has since relocated to Cyprus, placing him beyond the reach of extradition by the US (nobody else is interested in prosecuting). Kojo Annan, son of one Kofi Annan, consulted with the Swiss firm which did such a splendid job of compliance management for the suppliers. The UN maintains father and son’s relationship was strictly non-professional. Kojo invoiced the firm for trips with his father, though. When the great hue and cry goes up about how the war in Iraq was “illegal”, remember whose payroll the judges were on. Had it not been for the war, Saddam would still be using his oil wealth to subvert the few checks that the international community had the will to impose on him. To Avert The Coming Storm There isn’t just one Iraq war. There are dozens. There is the US vs. Baathist forces. There is the US vs. Al Qaeda and sundry foreign jihadis. Then there is the Shia vs. Sunni civil war(s), a series of battles waged by groups as small as a dozen armed men over areas as confined as a neighborhood, and simultaneously at a scale large enough to consume several provinces of the nation in flames. This last war isn’t caused so much by the US being in Iraq as an effective, brutal police state not being there. Saddam was not going to last forever. Sooner or later, he was going to be ousted from power, by coup, by revolution, or by dying peacefully in his sleep. Whenever that happened, the butcher’s bill for his decades of genocidal rule was going to come due. Scores were going to be settled, neighborhoods ethnically cleansed, and the nation divided by feuding tribal/ethnic/religious warlords in the mold of Muqtada al Sadr. Iraq was, quite unbeknownst to the rest of the world, slouching towards Somalia. There is a major difference between present-day Iraq and present-day Somalia: the US is present in Iraq, and that gives them a prayer of eventual peace. Mogadishu is currently embroiled in a civil war every bit as vicious as the violence afflicting Baghdad, and quite a bit more violent than the majority of Iraq (!). You’ll scarcely ever hear about it, because the camera follows America. You’ll never see anyone try to do anything about it, either. The war joins the fate of Iraq with the fate of the United States, and that means that people who matter care quite intensely about what is happening in the land of Far, Far Away. How to stabilize the Iraqi government will be a key issue in this election. Aid flows to build schools, restore electricity, and stimulate industry throughout the country. The United States and its coalition partners risk the lives of hundreds of thousands of their own troops to keep groups like Somalia’s proto-Taliban party from setting up shop in Iraq, and the surge appears to be working. We should all pray that it works. Regardless, none of this would have happened without the war – Iraq would have just joined the list of “failed states which are too #$’#( up for us to do anything about”. The war brought Iraq the hope, faint but growing brighter by the day, of a real, lasting peace. The Giving of Reasons This is what I have to offer the dead. I know it is not enough. Nothing can ever be enough of a cloak against the chill of the grave. But for the living, for those who would have died had we once again stood by and done nothing, who now may yet live to see a true and lasting peace, these are my Reasons.
__________________
"Even Dan Brown must live. Preferably not write, but live." -- Salman Rushdie, on issuing fatwas against writers.
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#3
11-06-07, 10:00 PM
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cross-examination
First, let me just read a question back to you in hopes that you might answer it for me:
"That thousand-word introduction, for example – is it a criteria? Is it a framework? Is it a criticism? It is a narrative? What does it mean?" ...You say "it is what it is and it means what it means." Would you care to elaborate, or are you content to stick with that answer? Second, what is the warrant for affirming the proposition? And is it tied into any explicit concept of "justification" you'd care to defend? I mean, there are many ways to say the war in Iraq is good; but saying it was justified, how is that different to you than just saying it was good? Or inevitable even? Third, what is the significance of your argument that Saddam's fall was inevitable...do you mean, just because all humans are motal? Or something else besides his natural death was inevitable? And why is this important? Finally, and all the love in the world as I ask this question, seriously...what happens if I just write out a bunch of anecdotes that generally suggest the war was unjustified? How would you suggest that our colleagues route through these competing narratives? Or are you going to be a little more...on point with what your stories and vignettes actually "mean" later on down the line?
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#4
11-07-07, 06:08 AM
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I have reordered your questions to make the answers flow in a more cohesive fashion, and included the questions for your convenience. My original text below here is approximately 580 words:
Quote:
“The war in Iraq is good” and “the war in Iraq was a good idea” are both close enough to “the war in Iraq is justified” for my purposes. You could negate either or both of these, or have some other form of advocacy. I will respond to whatever you choose to talk about, although I cannot guarantee that my response will necessarily follow the form of your objections. Quote:
All of us here have been choosing between competing narratives since we were old enough to talk. Was an explicit routing necessary each and every time we employed this life skill? Clearly not. Quote:
What it means: It has many meanings, and I can’t cover them all here. I rather don’t think I need to, since you are a professional student of rhetoric and the rest of the readers of this debate are smart cookies. I will, however, take the liberty of doing a high school English exercise in literary criticism just to prove I’m not trying to pull a fast one. Here are three conclusions you could draw and the textual evidence for them: 1) The author is NOT saying the war against Japan or Germany was unjust. The text explicitly makes the opposite contention, without a stated explanation for why the author believes the audience must agree. 2) The author argues, by construction of an elaborate analogy to the second world war, that the war in Iraq is just. 3) The author uses the reader’s initial expectation that the narrative is about Iraq, and then inverts it. He intends this inversion to be jarring, and that it cause the audience to rethink logic they may have already made up their minds about. I do not think that the above list is exhaustive or even fully descriptive of those limited slices of the argument. They don’t address the rhetorical device or the audience’s actual reaction to it, both of which matter. Quote:
__________________
"Even Dan Brown must live. Preferably not write, but live." -- Salman Rushdie, on issuing fatwas against writers.
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#5
11-12-07, 01:32 AM
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I profoundly apologize for the delay, and I guess this is an appropriate time to say I was a bit nasty to Travo when he bailed on our debate last year. Sorry. I've been stuck with limited internet access for the last three days for a variety of reasons, here in Winston-Salem. I'll post something either late tomorrow night or on Tuesday. Sorry Patrick, and all the judges, as well.
mjs
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#6
11-12-07, 06:38 PM
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No worries.
If you have no objection, once you post your speech I'll poof these two posts to make the thread flow better.
__________________
"Even Dan Brown must live. Preferably not write, but live." -- Salman Rushdie, on issuing fatwas against writers.
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#7
11-17-07, 11:05 PM
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1NC
I want to thank Patrick for agreeing to this debate, and for his (and everyone else's) patience in waiting for my opening speech.
__________________________________________________ ____ Overview: The danger of enthymemes and the value of procedural structure: “My speech,” the affirmative answers in cross-examination, “from first word to last, affirms the resolution.” And then later, “’The war in Iraq is good’ and ‘the war in Iraq was a good idea’ are both close enough to ‘the war in Iraq is justified’ for my purposes.” I am not asking for the minutiae of NDT-style line-by-line; I’m fine with readable reasoning. Nor am I asking for definitive proof of every point the affirmative makes. But the weighing mechanisms offered by the affirmative in this debate are not only grossly unfair to the negative and to the audience, but they also reflect what is most reflective of the intellectual and communicative poverty of the Bush administration: The deployment of enthymematic and incomplete arguments, innuendo, and emotion to justify an invasion that may not have been necessary, and that surely destroyed many, many innocent lives, and that was executed poorly (and, I submit, executed poorly precisely because it was allowed to be justified poorly). As the now-classic Wikipedia entry on enthymemes outlines, they are generally used for one of two, or both, reasons: Either the implied premise is obvious, or the implied premise is dubious. As I have argued elsewhere, in addition to the problem of "fairness" in structured debate situations (not fair for me to have to answer an argument not explicitly made, for myriad reasons), enthymematic argument presents a fundamental interpretive quandary to audiences, especially in a format of debate based on a “proposition” or “resolution” as a starting point of debate. If, in the course of reading the 1AC or subsequent affirmative speeches, you have to ask yourself precisely what the implications are of a certain statement or set of statements (because the affirmative neglects to say “this is important because…” or “I should win the debate, or this section of the debate here because…”) then you’ll know you’ve run into enthymematic discourse. Corrupt political administrations use enthymemes far more often than they use “newspeak.” This type of persuasion relies on innuendo and the expectation that argumentative gaps will be filled in by emotion or prejudice or unquestioned assumptions. I would never accuse the affirmative PERSONALLY of duping for the current administration, but the rhetorical similarity between their discourse leading up to the invasion and the discourse of the 1AC is disturbing: and ultimately, I submit, is a reason you should vote negative. Don’t fill in the affirmative’s gaps. Hold the affirmative to a standard of explicit, structurally rigorous proof, just as we ought to hold future administrations when they want to risk hundreds of thousands of lives. Moreover, reject any “deathbed conversion” from the affirmative. The 1AC simply should not have been written as it was, and that speech, and not any subsequent speech, is when explicit justification of the resolution should have occurred, because subsequent debate stems from that point of origin. Procedural rules, rules of discussion, debate and decision-making are, I firmly believe with every fiber of my soul, a matter of life and death. The affirmative will try to call the distinctions I make below nitpicky or overly technical. I say they hinge upon competing choices of how we choose to exist as citizens and human beings. My method of debate may be boring compared to a method that favors non-explicit arguments and dueling, emotive, hyperbolic narratives, but the last six years have proven to me the necessity of being explicit in politics. That said, here are my main arguments: 1. The affirmative’s hasty dismissal of the search for reasonable, stringent criteria for the word “just” I am not prepared to accept the affirmative’s jettisoning of the actual search for an actual consensus on the truth of the resolution. At best, the affirmative has proven that the invasion and occupation of Iraq was a good idea in the minds of some people. I submit that to call something “just” requires more, and should require more: Humanity deserves the search for that distinction. There are at least two different meanings of “justify” or “justification” the affirmative could have chosen: A. simple justification: prove the validity of a claim using an accepted method of proof. This method must be explicitly laid out, and a positive and unambiguous argument must be advanced as to how such criteria has been satisfied. B. public justification: prove the necessity of a policy action by offering sincere and debatable evidence to those affected by the action. The affirmative has not merely failed to do either of these; worse, the affirmative has flatly refused, in the 1AC or when prompted in cross examination, to even attempt to do either of these. The affirmative even had the chance to do so when stating that the warrants of the 1AC serve as proof that the invasion was “necessary.” At that point, I submit that the affirmative had a prima facie obligation to definitionally connect the word “necessary” with “just.” There are, in fact, many ethical frameworks in which the two are distinct. It is not my duty to present those frameworks in the 1NC (though I reserve the right to later; see below), because the affirmative has not done the opposite. The implications of this refusal are twofold: First, the affirmative should be declared the loser of this particular competitive speech situation. The resolution hasn’t been proven true, and what’s more, the very idea of proving the resolution true in any debatable sense has been deliberately rendered impossible. Second, however, there is a rather dangerous moral precedent set in the conflation of “acceptable” and “just.” If there is no distinction between the word “just” and words like “good,” “okay,” or “expedient,” then distinctions between utility and rightness break down, the consequences of which would surely include enslaving or raping 49% of the population in order to pleasure the other 51%. By way of a pre-empt: I believe the affirmative has already lost the debate because I believe the burden to set up a comprehensible, debatable criteria for demonstrating the truth of an “is” resolution, as well as a “value” resolution, lies strictly in the confines of the 1AC. But should any of you judges disagree with this, and should the affirmative attempt a post hoc interpretation of the prior speech act to derive a sense of “justification” based on the meanings I listed above, I reserve the right to refute the late bloomer that is the affirmative. My hope, for the sake of the integrity and educational value of this exchange, is that you will not even allow that to happen. The 1AC fails to prove the resolution true, and in CX the affirmative so much as admits this by appealing to the most unreasonably vague standard possible: that the ENTIRETY of the 1AC speech act constitutes proof that the resolution is true. 2. The inappropriateness of the Japan example: The affirmative’s lead-in narrative is, in fact, a narrative about Japan. Japan invaded the United States. Iraq did not invade the United States, nor did it ever threaten to invade the United States, nor did it invade any U.S. allies such that treaty obligations required U.S. retaliation. This seemingly trite refutation, floated across anti-war networks for quite some time now, is of far greater argumentative significance than the affirmative will presumably credit it. You see, when we argue from enthymemes, from suppressed premises and innuendo-laden conclusions, it becomes much too easy to make comparative semi-arguments that invite the audience to close off, rather than re-open, the thought process. The idea that Iraqis were responsible for the attacks of September 11 was at least as responsible for public support for the invasion as was unsubstantiated claims of WMD. Moreover, the even deeper enthymeme, the far more dangerous one, was that Iraqis MAY AS WELL HAVE been responsible for the attacks…since they are Islamic…since they are Arabs too. In numerous speeches arguing for the invasion, Bush invoked 9-11. He did so enthymematically…implying a connection between Iraq and the attacks on the WTC and Pentagon. The beauty of the enthymeme is that when you call someone out for deploying it, they can say “no, dude, that’s not what I said, don’t put words in my mouth,” but the power of the non-explicit present in the implied connections remains, filled in by the prejudices and emotions of the audience. You ought to vote against the affirmative MERELY for making a comparison that everyone, including the affirmative, knows to be inappropriate. But even if you don’t reject the affirmative for this transgression, you should look with skepticism on the rest of the affirmative’s enthymematic case. 3. The inadequacy of the affirmative’s defenses of the invasion: --The first “necessity defense”—to fix prior wrongs, actually proves the invasion was UNJUST precisely because it was the final step in a series of flawed, exploitative relations with the people of Iraq. Imagine that, for whatever reason, I decide to cause an acquaintance of mine to become addicted to PCP. Over the course of several weeks, I slip PCP in his cola, sprinkle it on his cigarettes, and even orate to him on the virtues of PCP to justify his desire to ingest it. Naturally, he becomes addicted and as a result turns violent and starts beating people up and destroying stuff. At this point, I tell myself, “Well, look, he’s violent, granted it’s my fault, but I need to do something about it.” So I beat the shit out of him. My beating the shit out of him can hardly be called a “just” action, even if in more than one moral universe it can be called a “necessary” action. The reason you shouldn’t call such an action “just” is precisely because it is linked to an entire history of enablement and abuse. It would be unacceptable to abstract the very last action committed against my friend—the beating—separated from the entire history of my actions toward him. It would be equally unwarranted to sever the very last action the U.S. does in relation to Iraq and call it “just” either in spite of, or because of, everything else the U.S. has done to Iraq. Finally, on this point, I would urge the panel to remember that even if the affirmative debates out this point, it should not result in an affirmative ballot, because the burden to prove the invasion was “just” was not initially met in the 1AC. If you think I am stumbling in the dark for appropriate arguments during this debate, that’s probably why. --The second defense, “we were the only ones who could or would,” isn’t worth refuting at all. If you read that entire subsection of the 1AC, you don’t actually find any evidence, or even any explicit assertion, that the United States was the only entity either willing or able to remove Saddam Hussein from power. You also find neither any evidence, nor even a ghost of an effort to make the point, that a full scale invasion was the only or best means of doing so. Again, I hope the audience will forgive my refusal to create affirmative arguments in order to refute them. That would be an unfair burden to me. Remember, on this point, what I said about enthymemes. The affirmative might very likely respond to the prior paragraph by extrapolating, expanding, and newly interpreting the words in the 1AC, in a sort of “didn’t you see what I was saying?” manner, in order to construct a positive justification for the resolution. That’s precisely why enthymemes are bad for debate, and why there exists a burden to explicitly prove the resolution true in the 1AC. This did not happen. --As to the third defense, that Iraq was “slouching toward Somalia.” First, even if this were true (and I’ll argue it is not), in order for this to be a warrant for the resolution, the affirmative would have to prove at least the second defense above, and maybe even both the first and the second. Second, (and you may cross apply this to the second defense above) this is where the lack of an explicit and comprehensive framework delineating the proper use of American military resources is fatal to the affirmative. In order to justify American occupation of Iraq utilizing the Somalia argument, the affirmative needs to make a case for American occupation of Somalia. To do this categorically, the affirmative needs to lay out the criteria for American occupation of…any place at all. It’s not enough for the affirmative to answer the request for such justification with “isolationism is bad, juuuudge” or to accuse the negative of some kind of moral insensitivity. The search for justifications for intervention in Iraq cannot be conceptually separated from the non-search for justifications for the non-intervention in North Korea, or the Sudan, or Burma. Clearly there are differences between those countries, and there are differences in imperatives and non-imperatives for intervention, but in order to offer a positive justification for a singular act of intervention, those differences must be laid out. By the affirmative. When they are, then I can answer these very, very particularist arguments. The affirmative concludes that section by speculating that the situation in Iraq is getting better. But pragmatism was not specifically offered as a definition of “just” in the 1AC. The affirmative is either moving the goalposts or hiding them. Either way, you have “The invasion was more good than it was bad,” but you don’t have “just.” As to the affirmative’s conclusion: Nobody is asking anyone to offer arguments to the dead. Rather, what I am asking is that explicit, debatable arguments be offered to the living. I find it troubling that the words “who now may yet live to see a true and lasting peace” are invoked at the bottom of the 1AC. That’s offensive, because the affirmative neither proves, nor even tries to prove, that the outcome, or the intent, of the invasion was or will be “a true and lasting peace.” Once again, the connection between antecedent and consequent is the shady, sealing-wax glue of enthymematic suppression, rather than an explicit causal or communicative chain of reasoning. 4. Finally, a conditional counter-interpretation: I reserve the right to refute any of the affirmative’s factual claims on-point later if the affirmative steps up and proves why those factual claims actually prove the words of the resolution true. As it stands, they do not. However, should those factual claims prove convincing, then I offer a counter-interpretation: Those arguments demonstrate that the war in Iraq is okay. There are two net-benefits to this counter-interpretation: First, it preserves “just” wars for those wars that actually satisfy explicit, consensus-based criteria for just wars. These could include defenses against invasions on home soil, defenses of other nations we are bound to by treaty or other explicit obligation, and the like. The impact of this philosophical distinction is precisely that “just” should mean something much, much different to us than “a necessary evil,” “acceptable,” or “okay.” We should preserve the meaning of “just” as something that truly stands apart. The second net-benefit of the counter-interpretation is that, to borrow the language of policy debate, it “solves all of case” while avoiding the “disadvantage” of conflating “just” with “acceptable.” It allows you, as the audience, to uphold a conditional, even skeptical and careful, acceptance of the invasion without calling the invasion “just.” If you share my own moral concerns, you would not want to call an action “just” unless its advocate actually made an explicit effort to prove it so.
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#8
11-18-07, 01:34 AM
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Thank you for the speech. I have grouped my questions by theme:
Questions About Enthymes 1. For the benefit of our audience members who are not professional students of rhetoric, could you please define "enthymeme" as you use it in your speech? 2. To the best of your knowledge, did you use any enthymemes in your speech? 3. Supposing a judge comes to the conclusion that an argument is being supported enthymemtically instead of by "explicit, structurally rigorous proof", how would you have them treat that argument? 4. Hypothetically supposing that we agree enthymemes are guilty of having been used to justify Really Bad Things, which rhetorical devices are innocent of the same charge? Questions About Procedural Rules 5. You mention that every fiber of your soul believes procedural rules and questions of decision-making to be a matter of life and death. Was that merely rhetorical flourish, or do you agree that if my framework for the debate is procedurally superior to yours that I should win? Questions About Justification 6. Regarding an "accepted method of proof", who is the authority doing the accepting and why should we care what their opinion is of my speech? 7. Regarding "public justification", do you believe that the claims made in my speech were either insincere or undebatable? Questions About Good Wars vs. Just Wars 8. You describe the counter-interpretation as "conditional", a term which has many meanings in the policy and parli communities. Not all of those meanings can be reconciled with each other, and in any event many members of our audience are not familiar with them. What does "conditional" mean for the purpose of this debate? 9. You mention that Iraq did none of the following: invade the US, threaten an invasion, or invade any allies we had treaty obligations to. Will you defend that these are necessary pre-requisites for just war? 10. Does the distinction between "good" and "just" have any relevance to deciding the question of "what should we do?" Should we oppose good wars which are not just?
__________________
"Even Dan Brown must live. Preferably not write, but live." -- Salman Rushdie, on issuing fatwas against writers.
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#9
11-19-07, 06:05 AM
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1. An enthymeme is an argument that is stated incompletely, with one or more major structural components ommitted, wherein the audience is expected to fill in those missing pieces themselves.
2. I made every effort to be explicit about the totality of all of my arguments. I know I didn't commit any sweeping enthymemes the nature of which I describe below in 3. 3. It depends on the nature of the argument. Some enthymemes are harmless. Others rely on the suppression of dubious and dangerous premises. My argument is that your invocation of Japan, a country that attacked the United States, to justify the invasion of Iraq, a country that did not attack the United States, is dangerous. 4. There may be other "rhetorical devices" used to justify bad things, but only enthymemes possess the power of evasion precisely because they contain unspoken argumentative components. 5. I am most comfortable with a paradigm that says you should win if you explicitly prove the resolutional statement, as worded, true. 6. I am comfortable ceding that authority to the judging panel. 7. Your claims may very well have been sincere. You have phrased many of them in ways that were functionally undebatable. And you miss the critical component of public justification: you haven't justified your arguments to those affected by the decision to invade. 8. The counter-interpretation is conditional upon the truth of your case claims. 9. My pointing out facts about what Iraq did not do was solely intended to demonstrate the illegitimacy of your Japan analogy. I will not take any position on the prerequisites of a just war, because that was your job. You didn't do it. You don't get to do an end-run around your resolutional burdens by waiting for me to construct an argument that you get to answer later. The resolution does not become true by default. 10. The resolutional question is not "what should we do?" My argument is that there is a difference between saying something is "okay" (read, acceptable, possibly a good idea) and saying something is "justified" (the product of a positive process of justification).
__________________
"How far off is the day when you will wake up and ask your partner for a kiss, only to be told that the person across the hall is willing to pay nine dollars for one?" ~Bill Martin
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#10
11-22-07, 01:17 AM
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Thank you, Stannard, for the excellent speech. I will address your discussion of enthymemes and the resolution, then my analogy versus your counter-advocacy, and close with Iraq.
Resolutions and Enthymemes Stannard claims, out of the clear blue sky, that the debate is “based” on the resolution. That is not how I remember things. I remember making a locally controversial claim on a message board (“The Iraq war is just”), then getting asked to do a public debate about the claim for pedagogical purposes. The resolution was an afterthought, which I happened to write. My only goal was to make it broad enough to encompass the arguments I thought Stannard would want to run. Stannard thinks I have stymied the debate because I did not start off with resolutional analysis, a criteria, and then three labeled subpoints which said “Impact”. Oh, sure, he says that I don’t have to debate NDT style… but this is a false generosity, when he claims that any other form of justification betrays who we are as citizens and human beings. I was at points enthymemetical and emotional. If you want to discuss the genocide of the Marsh Arabs and the necessity of a war guaranteed to kill innocents as dispassionately as discussing moving pieces around a chessboard, I’m sorry, today is not your day. But since he only argues that enthymemes are the invidious of the two, I’ll address those. Enthymemes are simply a rhetorical device, nothing more. They are no more good or evil than a hammer is good or evil. If you hammer in an innocent’s face, that does not make it an evil hammer. If you use a hammer to build a house for the needy, that does not make it a good hammer. You’ll note the conclusion to this argument is itself an enthymeme – and, since you’re not ignorant goldfish, you’re perfectly capable of understanding it without me forcefeeding it to you. Stannard uses enthymemes, frequently. A short list would include “value resolution means …”, “the Bush administration is corrupt”, and “competitive equity matters in a debating situation”. The biggest in his speech is unquestionably the enthymeme which is his only response to my central claim (the analogy about Japan): Japan is distinguishable from Iraq because Japan attacked us and this fact has moral significance. The fact that that claim wasn’t explicit didn’t make it any harder to refute – see below. If you see both sides freely using enthymemes, this should demonstrate to you that they are not harmful. (Stannard says that even if he used enthymemes they were not critical. Poppycock, it was his only response to my central claim.) Neither the debaters nor the audience are goldfish – if we think an important argument was not stated, we can still identify it and respond! Stannard proves he is capable of doing this – look at his answer to my analogy. Similarly, if Stannard believes I am exploiting the audience’s prejudices, he could identify and refute the prejudices. I can only infer from his speech that the prejudice being exploited is “Iraq was somehow responsible for 9/11 because they’re Arabs”. I mocked that in my analogy, and no one here believes it. Ask yourself: prior to this debate, were you going “Rah rah, bomb the Arabs”? Search your feelings and, please, vote against me if you think I was using secret code to exploit your invidious prejudices. If I was merely exploiting your prejudice against genocidal dictators and the corrupt bureaucrats who enable them, though… GREAT. Stannard’s speech makes a distinction between enthymemes and justification, but it is structured so that these claims are intimately intertwined. You can only believe I have not justified the resolution if you believe enthymemes are invidious. I continue to maintain that my whole speech constitutes support of the resolution. Maybe that claim isn’t something the world of topicality, criteria, and impacts teaches you to expect, but it is anything but vague. I explicitly say that I believe the war was just, morally righteous, a good idea, and at least partially successful. I invited Stannard, when he asked me what I thought “just” meant, to beat me by refuting any of these. He says I am hiding the goalposts. Hardly. I am merely refusing to reduce the discussion to a single thread of the tapestry. There can be no binary “Did they, or did they not, bomb us first?” comparison, for reasons I discuss later. Stannard offers some examples of possible justification. I don’t owe Stannard a duty to use only arguments he approves of, but be that as it may I meet his requirements for “public justification”. Did I prove the Iraq war was necessary? Yep, on the factual debate. The fact that I tried is enough to moot Stannard’s argument. As long as I claim my speech proves the war is necessary (“I’ve got three big Reasons why the Iraq war was necessary.”), then he has all he needs to begin arguing that the war was not necessary or that it doesn’t matter that it was. He tries to do this, ineffectually, due to his own decision of argumentative priorities. As to justifying the war to those affected by it, we are all affected by the war. Even if we weren’t, the Marsh Arabs certainly are, so even if you think only their opinions count ask the imaginary Marsh Arab reading the debate whether stopping the genocide of his family was reason enough. Moreover, my use of analogies and enthymemes provides for a superior debate compared to Stannard’s requirement that we have explicit resolutional analysis, criteria, and impact statements. Among other reasons, my framework provides for direct and meaningful disagreement and for a debate which engages this audience. Ever seen a debate where both sides run from the issue to avoid giving up competitive advantage? The proof by analogy and my (supposedly) unstated justifications was fearless in this regard. I didn’t have to rigorously prune subpoint 47C to avoid giving Stannard links. I told you that the war was just. I told you that it was morally required. I told you that it was necessary to avert a coming genocide. I told you that it had actually stopped one genocide. I told you, in CX, that I would defend these claims to the death. What does Stannard’s alternative leave you with? Can Stannard tell you the war was unjust? No, he merely says “not proven sufficiently”, but reserves the right to make up his mind in the rebuttal. Can Stannard tell you what it means for a war to be just? He doesn’t want to talk about that. Stannard’s central claim against my analogy is that war is justified by self-defense alone, but he runs screaming from that claim when questioned. I told you to use your own conscience (perish the thought!). Maybe that will make this a harder debate for you if you are wedded to being a goldfish. But there can be no doubt about the claims I was making, and I have never been evasive in the slightest about what I believe and why. You’ll note that my opening rhetorical device was effective, indeed, it was the only thing effective in either speech at getting Stannard to commit to anything of substance. If you don’t agree with me on the Iraq war, and neither Stannard nor (I assume) the majority of the audience does, when your expectation about the analogy is upended you feel a moment of panic. Your absolute certainty that WWII was Just conflicts with your certainty that Iraq was not, and your brain seizes for a distinction. Stannard’s brain seized on “wars are just only for protecting Country and Treaty”. That claim is directly responsive to my speech and, oh, catastrophically wrong. More later. The reason for this debate is not to garner either of us glory or trophies by proving the truth or falsity of a resolution – it has an academic purpose, for an audience which is not parli hacks, to engage the issues surrounding the Iraq war. Marsh Arabs, complicity of the United Nations Oil For Food program, internecine religious/political/tribal violence, do these issues ring a bell? (Hint: you’ll have to scroll past Stannard’s speech to see them, but they were there.) Stannard says that procedural debates are a matter of life and death, and I also love a good T throwdown. But this debate is not for Stannard and it is not for me. It is for his argumentation class, and if “explicit justifications” means you have to produce pseudo-English like “The second net-benefit of the counter-interpretation is that … it solves all of case while avoiding the disadvantage of conflating just with acceptable”, then phooey on that method of argument. My argument was, by contrast, engaging from the very first sentence. You want to hear the story, and in hearing the story you absorb my larger framework. Then your expectations are upended, and you are forced to contemplate your own innermost justifications or anti-justifications for the war. Then, having been refreshed of why you think the war is a good or bad idea, you are in a receptive mood to critically reflect on my moral and pragmatic justifications for it. I never attempt to persuade by battering your consciences into submission, and I never have to resort to transparently unproven idiocy like “Pragmatism means 51% of the world rapes the other 49%” in the hope that my opponent doesn’t reach it on his flow. What should you do if you find my style of debate superior? Let’s ask the very fibers of Stannard’s soul. They tell you that superior methods of justification are a matter of life and death. So if you prefer direct conflict over the issue of the day and an accessible debate for Stannard’s students over some parsing of irrelevant parli traditions about resolutionality, Stannard’s fibers tell you to vote for me. Dueling Alternatives Stannard thinks his counter-interpretation is “declare that the ‘just’ claim was not warranted sufficiently even if you believe the ‘good’ claim was”. This should require him to take a position on what “just” means and how the difference between “just” and “good” compels us to treat the two things differently. Had he consistently done this, even if he never said a word about Iraq his speech would have been a magnificent and morally powerful treatment of just war theory. However, when he ducks and weaves around ever providing a counter-interpretation for “just”, and when he says “The resolution doesn’t require me to say whether we should act differently”, it puts the lie to his contention that the distinction is meaningful. Luckily, though, my rhetorical device has allowed us to access the inner, better, argumentatively courageous Stannard. He says it is self-evidently true that the war with Japan was justified through self-defense and treaty obligations, and that as Iraq tripped neither of these two triggers it is unjust. Finally, a clear position! False, but clear! Self-defense and treaty obligations are selfish, incoherent, and ultimately destructive rationalizations for just war. Self-defense, the idea that Country and Countrymen matter but that the rest of the world doesn’t, is inherently selfish. Standing alone, that isn’t bad, and I agree that self-defense justifies a reasonably conducted war by itself. However, transforming it from a justification to a requirement commits a great evil. The evil is to blind yourself to the suffering of people outside your borders. Self-defense, in the war context, isn’t really a defense of self at all. My grandfather was on Iwo, but what “self defense” brought him there? He was in the middle of an Illinois cornfield when the bombs fell on Pearl Harbor, and was not in the least bit of personal danger at the hands of the Empire of Japan. His countrymen were, of course, at least as long as the Pearl Harbor attack was ongoing. And it was a just and righteous thing that granddad was ordered to the defense of his countrymen (although, since the bombs could scarcely be recalled, a strict reading of self-defense would suggest that the just response is not to make war but to sue for peace, which would have saved more American lives, though it would have condemned Asia to Japan’s predations). Stannard’s argument does not just suggest, but it requires, that you believe it would NOT be just to send granddad to the defense of the Chinese, the Filipinos, the Malay, and the thousand other victims of Japanese aggression absent the attack on Pearl. (Note I am talking about the people, not the nations. Self-defense in Stannard’s conception of just war means that nations have rights, but that people have none. You will reject this.) The idea that nations have rights is closely tied with the “war can be justified to protect treaty obligations”. In its only nod to the duty that the strong protect the weak, Stannard’s conception of just war allows the weak (nations) to appeal to the strong (nations) and let them borrow the weak (nations) moral right to defend their subjects. But what of weak people? If they lack a righteous sovereign, they are ignored. Who possessed the ability to intervene on behalf of the Marsh Arabs in Stannard’s conception of just war? Only Saddam Hussein – the very monster who was slaughtering them. The Marsh Arabs could not resist his predations by themselves – their pre-industrial culture could not hope to defend against tanks, helicopters, fumigation, and weaponization of the environment itself. Stannard says that justifications matter, and oh boy, do they ever. When he speaks of consensual criteria to determine whether a war is just, remember whom the consensus must be among. It is between victims and their abusers. There can be no more just consensus between them than there be a just division of food between the lions and the lambs. (Tell you what, we’ll compromise and only eat half of you!) In the international arena, the logic of this perversion of justice requires that nations come together and consent. Great plan. The evildoers and their bought-and-paid-for lackeys block any effective action to stop the bloodletting, and instead spend time pontificating at the UN about the need for proof and consensus. This is no Justice that is worthy of the name. Stannard asks you to look forward at what we will ask of the next administration to ask for war. Who needs the future when we have the present! Look to Darfur, to what any fool can see is a genocide, and to the speeches at the UN. Too bad, so sad, but China and Russia are doing too much business with them to approve any meaningful sanctions. Don’t worry, we’ll set up a committee. If you’re prepared to say “Yes, yes, I want the distinction between what is Just and what is merely Right. I want a Consensus between the killers and the dead. I want to be moved by Reasons acceptable to the killers’ lackeys and not merely by the Emotion of all this admittedly true talk of hundreds of thousands being slaughtered”, then vote for Stannard’s counter-interpretation. If this strikes you as wrong, there is only one alternative to it in the debate round. Say that County and Treaty are lovely things but they are not morally required for a just war. Say that the analogy was true and that that war was just long before December 7th. Say that this war, distinct in no morally relevant fashion, is just as just. Can we talk about Iraq now, Patrick? Sorry, I have to talk about what Stannard wants to talk about, and that apparently does not include Iraq. After spending all the time discussing enthymemes and justification, he maintains that he does not need to address the factual claims I make because he doesn’t know what they mean. Regardless of what you believe about justice, the claims that Saddam had bought control of the UN’s containment regime, that the war stopped the genocide against the Marsh Arabs, that the United States had previously promised the Iraqi people we would remove Saddam, and my other factual claims stand on their own merits. Stannard says he’ll talk about why they don’t in his rebuttal, if he feels like it. If you let him do that, this debate will come down to his 4,000 words of “no” against my 1,400 words of “yes” in my rebuttal, and I will be crushed under the tide. Don’t let that happen. The proper point to address the truth of my unambiguous factual allegations was the first negative speech. Let’s talk PCP boy. I would first say that it is nice that Stannard found out how to argue by analogy. Snark aside, it is a false analogy. My speech proves that there was no overarching plot in the years of our confused, contradictory, and befuddled Iraq policy. Our only consistency was failure. The war is not beating up the victim, because we are not making war on the Iraqi people, but rather on those who would divide and slaughter them. Additionally, my Japan analogy is responsive to this] Japan was before WWII a close ally, but the war with them was not unjust. Miffed about how I always bring Japan up? Look anywhere you like. Are our relations with Mexico, or Russia, or Korea, or Cuba free of errors of commission and omission? Are we to be condemned to passivity in all of these places by the errors of the flawed men who came before us? And if we are, isn’t that passivity itself the last in the line of abuses America has committed?! Had we left the sanctions and Oil for Food in place, as I claim would have happened absent the war (the claim was not contested), the immoral last act of American Iraq policy would be to bankroll the suffering of the Iraqi people to sate our lust for oil. Is this supposed to be more just than the war?! If you believe there was a viable alternative to war, rather than saying “Patrick only proved that war by proxy, limited war, sanctions, and diplomatic engagement had failed before, but he didn’t nix every alternative to invasion”, then the right response was to either offer an alternative or concede the point. Stannard’s inability to do the first has forced him to do the second. Stannard says I should present reasons why the US should go to Somalia. This fundamentally misunderstands the argument: I want to save Iraq before it descends into an uncontrolled internecine war, not after! After the bloodletting had started, who would care: it is just a few more deaths in the land of Far, Far Away. Stannard wants reasons for intervening in Burma, Korea, the Sudan, and Somalia. Give me another twenty thousand words and it’s on! As it is, I have enough time to argue for righting one injustice today. I can no more save the entire world with my limited resources than the US can, but we should not ignore what we can do out of a foolish consistency. Conclusion This debate remains a tapestry, not a discussion of individual threads. Look to the three themes I identified above, and vote your conscience.
__________________
"Even Dan Brown must live. Preferably not write, but live." -- Salman Rushdie, on issuing fatwas against writers.
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#11
11-28-07, 10:19 AM
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Negative Block
I'm a little frustrated by the affirmative’s repeated and sneering insistence that my arguments are irrelevant to the question of the justification of the invasion, that they constitute a distraction from the obligation to stare into the face of the suffering and say enough is enough, recognize and atone for past failure, prevent future genocide. My arguments are not cynical, strategery-laden pieces of gamesmanship. A general concern for the manner of construction of a philosophical or political question isn’t a distraction from the imperatives of ethical immediacy, especially in a setting where none of us have the power to steer our nation to go to war or not go to war, and within the confines of a debate whose focal event happened in the past. Instead, ethical immediacy is inseparable from the manner of constructing an imperative, a decree, that will/did affect people and that people are expected to collectively affirm.
There are many levels of affirmation. My advocacy, which (I presume) needn’t be any more specific than the affirmative advocacy, is to make a distinction between two levels of affirmation, and to suggest that there are positive reasons to make that choice, “offense” in the language of debate—a useful language for arguing about public propositions and forced choices, a framework that the affirmative hurls ad homs against but doesn’t meaningfully discuss, beyond suggesting that if you evaluate arguments the way I think you ought to, you are “goldfish.” The only way the affirmative could have prevailed in this debate was to make arguments as to the necessity of calling the Iraq war “justified” rather than something else. That did not happen, and I do not have the opportunity to respond to such arguments if they are made in the affirmative’s final speech. And yes, I’ll unapologetically say, it’s debate 101: you need disads to the alternative. You need offense on the inclusion of the word I PIC out of. No risk to the alternative. It “solves case” because we could have—and did—invade Iraq without using as justification (public or otherwise) the reasons given in the affirmative’s opening speech. The question of whether this “strategy” is a trivialization of those reasons will be addressed several times during this speech. You are not “goldfish” if you vote that the affirmative has failed to offer a positive defense of calling the invasion “justified” when (a) the affirmative fails to explicitly define “justify” or internally link his supposed imperative to the use of the term, and (b) there are reasons, found in the everyday language we use, to call the invasion something just short of justified—something that doesn’t imply that a process of consistent, deliberative justify-ing was used to make the decision to go to war. I give reasons why that distinction is important, reasons the affirmative doesn’t answer, instead electing to ridicule my framework and accuse me of viewing the world as chess pieces. The impacts of ignoring exactitude and relying on incomplete arguments outweigh any risk that we will be reduced to overly-analytic, sophistic cynics. Such ignorance, as I argued (and the affirmative conceded) is tied to poor decisionmaking and poor execution; it undermines our ability to decide when to wage war, and even mucks up the execution of the war. Quote:
When the affirmative says he refuses to reduce the conversation to a single thread of the tapestry, well, that tapestry is “the war in Iraq was justified.” Words have meaning, not just in the game of debate, but in life itself—especially collective life. There may not be any “objective” meaning to words, I don’t know or care. But humans have the ability to collectively make functional distinctions between words, and I say that there is a functional distinction between those synonyms, and that in the context of warfighting, of the decisions we make to wage war, those distinctions may be a matter of life and death. Quote:
The point about the Marsh Arabs is especially important here: The Marsh Arabs have gone from a briefly-mentioned victim inside of a larger paragraph inside of a larger subsection of the 1AC to being the center of the “justification” for the invasion. (I kind of warned you that this would happen...). But repression of the Marsh Arabs was not presented as a public justification for the invasion. This is important because it underscores my distinction between “good” and “justified.” We didn’t ask the Marsh Arabs, and the invocation of the “imaginary Marsh Arab” is curious coming from the speaker who accuses me of making people into chess pieces. The affirmative never presents evidence saying the Marsh Arabs supported the U.S. invasion…such evidence would be hard to find because the U.S. did not ask them. The fact that they are benefiting from the invasion is something you can acknowledge by adopting my alternative—an alternative whose solvency and net-benefit are conceded by the affirmative. The Marsh Arabs are just as well-off whether you vote aff or neg. The alternative captures the benefit of supporting restorative action for the Marsh Arabs, but does not risk the moral cloudiness of casually calling the war “justified” on the basis of things that were not included in the primary justifications for the war; as well as not risking the papering over of our lousy and brutal execution of the war. Quote:
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Also, terms of debate are not “pseudo-english,” I don’t think my concerns constitute unproven idiocy, and I’m not trying to spread out the affirmative. If the affirmative wants to continue to make this a debate about style, then you should vote against him for his accusations concerning my motives. Quote:
Even if you are put off by my Socratic pressure on the affirmative to make a categorical statement concerning when wars are justified, you have to admit it was precisely that pressure that forced the affirmative to eventually say (imply, really) something very simple: “A war is justified when the weak are being oppressed by the powerful and nobody else is doing anything about it.” Instead, my alternative says: The Iraq war was not, per se, justified, even though some good things came of it. A war might be regrettably necessary when we are the ones who empowered the powerful and encouraged and turned a blind eye to their oppression of the weak, but we should not comfort ourselves by calling such a war “justified.” My alternative accounts for moral complexity. It “solves” Darfur because it envisions a world where our leaders will say “We should intervene in the Sudan because people are getting murdered” rather than “We should intervene in the Sudan because they will soon have nuclear weapons capable of hitting us in 45 minutes, and they are a whole lot like the people who crashed planes into our buildings.” The fact that the affirmative offers those reasons now does not do anything for the Iraqis, who were not part of that process of initial justification. The divergence from the initial false justifications, in fact, makes it more difficult for us to invoke ethical and humanitarian justifications in the future. It is because I recognize the legitimacy of such justifications that I offer an alternative to calling this war justified. The affirmative framework is not necessary to recognize both the affirmative’s moral imperatives and the negative’s moral complexities. The affirmative’s only vaguely competitive argument against the alternative rests on a misinterpretation of a different part of the debate, further distorted by his non-reciprocal insistence that it’s my job to define “just war” and “justified.” He’s in a bit of a pickle now: If he explicitly defines either, it’s new. But if he doesn’t, then he’s incapable of proving why the alternative is worse than his own advocacy. He hasn’t offered a permutation. Look at his factual claims in the 1AC and ask yourself: do I really need to call the Iraq war “justified” if all these claims are true. Vote negative with a clear conscience that you have acknowledged the aff’s concern for the people of Iraq AND my concern for a transparent political process of justification. As to the question of when a war is justified, and the affirmative’s attempt to pigeon-hole me as being some crass nationalist: First, remember that the affirmative never gave ANY explicit criteria for when a war is just or when the act of advocating a war constitutes “justifying it.” As I predicted, the affirmative merely waited for me to offer a counter-criteria and then said it was bad. Even if it’s as bad as the affirmative says it is, it’s not as bad as an affirmative not offering any explicit criteria or definition of “justified” in the first place. Second, the alternative isn’t so easily pigeon-holed. When I said that “just” wars might be those that result from invasion or treaty obligations, I also clearly indicated other interpretations would be possible. There might be a variety of reasons to JUSTIFY a war. In this instance, the Iraq war was not justified, but it could have been. Because of the moral ambiguity surrounding it, because the public justifications given were not the same as the 1AC in this debate, you should prefer my alternative. The alternative no more ties me into selfish, state-centric nationalism than the affirmative is tied into being responsible for all the bad stuff the state does when he chooses to filter his moral obligation towards the Marsh Arabs through the state (it wasn’t a bunch of concerned private citizens who prosecuted this war). Finally, the affirmative argues that I am running a “consult Saddam” counterplan. This is a misinterpretation of my advocacy that justifications should occur in the context of a conversation with those who are affected by a decision. Lots of ordinary, innocent Iraqis were affected by this decision: Some were made better off, some were not, and some are dead, or their children are dead. Those are the people I’m talking about, and the alternative accesses them by raising the threshold of what constitutes “justified.” As for the assertion that I don’t want to discuss Iraq, or that I’m denying the affirmative the opportunity to do so: Wrong. The alternative solves for all of the affirmative’s factual claims about Iraq. It solves better, and here’s why: There are competing interpretations of the PCP and Japan analogies. These competing interpretations could, in fact, both be true. That’s moral ambiguity for you. We did enable Iraq. We did manipulate and falsify claims. But the Iraqi people were suffering. The alternative acknowledges the paradoxical nature of these facts by saying: Not justified per se, but acceptable in a problematic world. (If the affirmative objects to the different ways I have phrased the alternative, remember that the aff said the ENTIRE 1AC was the warrant for the resolution. My vagueness is no worse than his, and is at least partially necessitated by his.) And, the fact that the alternative captures the reasons why the affirmative feels compelled to go to war also means that I don’t have to provide an “alternative” in the form of sanctions or proxy invasion, etc. Our concrete policy alternatives were few and far between because we messed up Iraq, the region, the globe, with a bunch of bad policy choices…precisely because we have never followed explicit, transparent criteria of JUSTIFICATION for those actions. My alternative acknowledges this, the affirmative doesn’t, and the affirmative doesn’t make a permutation. Moreover, don’t let the affirmative turn this debate into a childish contest of “who talked more about what was really going on in Iraq.” I am giving the affirmative his own voice on Iraq rather than silencing it with ridiculous arguments like Saddam wasn’t that bad, or that the U.S. hasn’t done anything good. I am merely offering a different conclusion based on his premises. Let’s wrap this up: Quote:
The affirmative asks you to look inside your soul to decide which way to vote. I admit I can’t access your soul. My whole argument is about access: in justification through explicit adherence to clear criteria. Precision is necessary for transparency, transparency for access, and access for the ability of all of us to participate in the decision to war, or not. By going one step further in contemplating the meaning of a resolutional term glossed over by the 1AC (and only defensively reasserted among ad homs in the 2AC), my alternative garners 100% of the retrospective arguments in defense of the war, without any risk that those arguments would be less available were you to strip the term “justified” from the statement in question. And if there’s any talk in the 2AR of me being more concerned about the "game" than suffering people, that’s just not cool…such accusations are themselves "gamey" and undermine what was otherwise a very engaging, friendly, and important debate. You should also extend some leeway to me for sacrificing a lot of my word count to verbatim transcripts of the affirmative speech. Thanks for reading.
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#12
11-29-07, 05:03 AM
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Thank you Stannard, it’s been a wonderful debate. To my knowledge I never made an ad hominem, but if you thought I did, I apologize. Stannard is one of the bright lights of the debating community and probably the best coach in the activity. That being said, his arguments in this debate are inadequate.
This debate is about the same three themes as before: the specific factual claims I made about Iraq, enthymemes and justification, and Stannard’s alternative(s) versus my advocacy. The Factual Debate Stannard says he didn’t necessarily have to address Iraq to prove the war less than just. I agree, he could have had a competing conception of justice or alternative which rendered the facts moot. However, his arguments rely on premises that the undisputed facts refute. Let me remind you of them: It was conceded that the US promised the Iraqi people that we would remove Saddam, that Iraq’s oppressed minorities acted upon our promise, that we reneged on our promise, and as a result many of them lost their lives. We then instituted systems which had the effect of strengthening Saddam’s hand against his own people, and absent the war we would still be paying Saddam to murder them. I argued, explicitly, in big bold letters, that the war was necessary to avert this. Stannard’s only response, PCP boy (an analogy whose meaning was “The fact that you have done evil in the past and are doing it in the present does not make stopping and reversing the evil just”), was proven to be disanalagous and, if you treated it seriously, to require passivity in the face of evil worldwide. Stannard abandoned the argument in his rebuttal. I argued that the international community was thoroughly corrupted by Saddam’s oil wealth, and that they actively opposed effective action because they were corrupted, and that only the war cured the corruption. I argued that the war stopped one genocide and prevented another, and stopped many other abuses. Stannard says that I have retroactively decided to focus solely on the Marsh Arabs. This is just not true – I have referred and will continue to refer to all of the facts which he fails to dispute, not “merely” that the war stopped one particular genocide. (Which is important in its own right, despite it being but a portion of Saddam’s abuses!) All of these moral and pragmatic justifications for the war have been explicit for three speeches now, and they remain unanswered. This is all you need to vote. Even if you don’t believe I explicitly tied “the war is good” and “the war pragmatically stops and prevents genocide” to “just”, you will still vote for me, because non-explicit justifications are just as good: Enthymemes and Justification In Stannard’s first speech, all talk of “public justification” was about my public justifications. The Marsh Arabs, the Kurds, the Shia, were, most definitely, in my public justifications for the war. I will talk about Bush’s justifications during some other Iraq war debate where 80% of the speech is “Bush’s justifications were inadequate” rather than “Patrick’s justifications to these debate judges were not explicit”. I told you in my member speech that Stannard’s argument about justification was intimately intertwined with his arguments against enthymemes. If you stop believing enthymemes are harmful, then you don’t need my resolutional analysis, criteria, and impacts to be explicit. You can find the “goalposts” without me saying “this is a goalpost”. Stannard had four thousand words and never mentioned enthymemes once. Enthymemes are thus not merely “not harmful” but in fact advantageous. They do not conceal but rather help expose our innermost reasons for believing the war to be just or unjust. This is directly responsive to Stannard’s summation based on “access”. Only my rhetorical choices have allowed us to access Stannard’s views on just war. Every time his speech says “explicit justification”, remember that not only has he conceded my explicit justifications, he no longer has any support for the assertion that explicitness is required of justifications. You can no longer reject alternate forms of justifications like enthymemes and analogy. My speeches were engaging. I don’t want to win just because I outmaneuvered Stannard on his own procedural debate. Another time, perhaps. Instead, vote because the totality of my advocacy is superior to his alternatives. Dueling Alternatives Stannard’s claim about the public justification of the war with Japan being important is brand-spanking new. In his first speech, “It was self-defense!” is a claim about the facts, not about rhetoric about the facts. The public justification for that war was “We should kill those Jap bastards”. The war was publicly justified largely by revenge and hatred, but this doesn’t make it unjust. That war would have been every iota as just without Pearl Harbor, as was conceded, and this proves by analogy that the morally indistinguishable Iraq war is just as just. Stannard says, hypothetically, he could possibly believe WWII was unjust, too. Hypothetically, he could have signaled that at any point in his earlier speeches, and equally hypothetically, he could have warranted it. I hate hypotheticals. The alternative changes quite a bit between his speeches. In the first, it is “say that the war was morally righteous but not ‘just’ in the sense of explicit, consensus-based criteria, like defense of Country and Treaty”. In the second, it has become “say that the war was morally righteous but not ‘publicly justified’ to the Iraqi people”. Let’s talk about the old alternative: Stannard is correct, I’m not perming this, because it is strictly inferior to my advocacy. He claims that it allows you to recognize moral ambiguity about Iraq, but this requires there to be moral ambiguity. He abandoned defenses of his only stab at moral ambiguity, “PCP boy”. He can identify no features of a just war the Iraq war lacks. Except “The Iraq war lacks defense of Country and Treaty, and for that it is unjust”. I explained, at great length, how making these requirements for war commits a great evil. I explained how it is unjust. Stannard says only “I didn’t say that on this part of the flow”, which is just false. Where are the moral arguments against the war that show you why poorly justified wars, like this one, turn out bad? His assertions that poor justification yields poor execution or results would be more persuasive if he ever talked about the execution or results. Stannard says his alternative envisions a world with just and compassionate global leaders, and thus, the residents of Darfur will be saved. What world is this?! We live in a world where enough of our global leaders are the bought-and-paid-for lackeys of evil men that his alternative is, in effect if not intent, a “consult the evil dictator” counterplan. These lackeys will quote Stannard’s beautiful, sincere, and well-intentioned words about the importance of justification to their own not-at-all beautiful purposes. Indeed, as I pointed out, that is exactly what is happening today when we discuss doing something about Darfur. China and Russia “deplore” the situation, but maintain that we are “just short” of being morally justified in taking action to reverse it. Stannard tries to obliterate any operative distinction between “just short of justified” and “justified”, so that he can have his cake and eat it, too. In Darfur, action which is “just short of justified” is action that will never be taken. The new alternative, “say that the war was good but not justified sufficiently to the Iraqi people”, makes its first appearance in the rebuttal and should be disregarded. (You can check this claim fairly quickly, since he only references the Iraqi people twice in the first speech.) My first speech continues to be adequate justification, since Stannard can no longer discount enthymemes and analogies. Additionally, I remind you we promised the Iraqi people that we would remove Saddam and many of them accepted, acted upon, and paid the price for that promise. Stannard says you should now pinch your nose and grudgingly accept the fulfillment of that promise. On the contrary – if you think the United States’ dialogue with the Iraqi people matters an iota, you should enthusiastically accept that keeping our word was morally required and just. (The Iraqi people are first mentioned as an alternative in the rebuttal, so give me some leeway with referring to my long-standing contention that our promises to them matter.)
__________________
"Even Dan Brown must live. Preferably not write, but live." -- Salman Rushdie, on issuing fatwas against writers.
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#13
11-29-07, 03:27 PM
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Thank you Patrick and Matt, great debate, I know I enjoyed reading it. Judges, Mike, Andrew, Alan - comments and decision at your leisure, or as soon as you reasonably can.
J
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Among those who have never lived elsewhere, it is fashionable to scoff that the American dream is a myth. But to new immigrants, it is both real and exciting.
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#14
12-08-07, 04:27 PM
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I want to start by thanking both Patrick and Matt for giving us a very entertaining and thought-provoking look into the war in Iraq and the role and purpose of rules in a debate round. That said, I found this debate an interesting challenge to judge as it is in many ways not the standard parliamentary debate round I am used to judging. I guess I can start by addressing my feelings on the procedural arguments. I was at the start very sympathetic to them because I also had some trouble understanding what Patrick meant by "justified." Also, the analogy of the war with Japan did not seem all that appropriate to me. That said, I feel that as the debate wore on, the procedural arguments got considerably less clear. Patrick makes a functional "we meet" to the procedural argument when he says that Matt would only have to defeat any possible meaning of the word justified in order to win the round. I saw this as Patrick giving Matt the ability to present to him any possible meaning of justified and then force him to defend it. This also seemed to function as a "no articulated abuse" argument as Patrick used it through his subsequent speeches. From a "strategery" standpoint, this seemed like a golden opportunity for Matt to prove to us the harm behind not providing an explicit definition of justified by holding Patrick to the harshest standard of justified and then watch him whine about it. I don't ever see Matt making these arguments, but instead asks me to vote negative purely because the definition of "justified" is not in the 1AC. Since Patrick seems willing to defend any adjective we can apply to the war, I'm not entirely sure why Matt didn't stick him with an unfavorable definition. However, I can see the point Matt is trying to make with the counter-interpretation and the problems that occur with conflating "okay" with "justified." But, given Matt's idea on "public justification," I think Patrick has given enough to meet that requirement, particularly regarding his argument that we had promised the Iraqi people that we would remove Saddam Hussein and were now finally making good on that promise. This seems to me to be a public justification, and is where my decision finds its home. I can see reason to strike Patrick's other arguments from the debate on the grounds of being extra-topical, given Matt's public justification definition. Settling on this argument, though, leads me to an affirmative ballot primarily due to Matt's collapsing out of this argument in the 2nd negative and Patrick's subsequent exploding of the argument. Matt's only response was that of the PCP addict (which wasn't a particularly persuasive analogy in the first place). Patrick responded to it without any refutation from Matt. To me, choosing to make good on a public promise that we had ignored for over a decade (and this ignorance resulted in a multitude of deaths, as Patrick argues) seems to be a good enough public justification for me. Good debate everyone. I hope Matt's students enjoyed it.
__________________
"In this life you've got to be oh-so-smart or oh-so-pleasant. I've been smart. I prefer pleasant." -Jimmy Stewart
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#15
12-08-07, 06:08 PM
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I too want to thank both Matt and Patrick for their participation in this very interesting and enjoyable-to-read debate. It's nice every now and then to get out of the standard format we all have grown so accustomed to.
Unlike Andrew, I found the opening analogy both powerful and persuasive. I did feel the lurch Patrick was talking about as my expectations were jarred when it was revealed that the story was about Japan. Turning to the substance of the debate, I too end up voting for the Affirmative/Proposition. It was a close thing, but I feel Patrick came out ahead on the justification/alternative debate. Looking at the alternative, Matt gives two examples of just wars (self-defense and treaty obligations), which Patrick proceeds to answer, providing the disadvantages that Matt later calls for in the block. I also have some issues with interpretations. Matt is probably right that Patrick should have started the debate with a definition of the word "just." However, when offering the alternative, he fails to articulate a counter-interpretation that I can look to. Like Andy, I would have been fine with saddling Patrick with a really abusive definition. But the failure to do so leaves me with little to consider in the way of "good" vs. "just." Based on Patrick's answers to the alternative in the MG, and the argument that we have publicly justified the war to the Iraqis, I think he has done enough to win the debate, since there is no other reason articulated to reject the affirmative. I wanted to say, I found the enthymeme position to be quite interesting and I wish it had been carried through further. Overall, a very good round. I hope the students and others reading this debate enjoyed it as much as I did. Alan
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#16
12-14-07, 01:17 AM
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Thanks all, sorry for the delay. I sat for opp by stannard.
I didn't flow this (though I could copy/paste to excel and review the round that way) but I thought it was a lot easier than Andrew and Alan saw it. Matt says that Patrick has to clearly define what is justified, and if he does not, he should not win. I don't think Patrick wins that he doesn't have to construct this definition, and I don't think that he constructs it. I'm not convinced I need a counter-interpretation like Alan suggests. Ultimately, without a direct comparison of arguments, I find myself struggling to look back at who said what and wanting a flow. I think this is a flaw in non-flow debate, but may be a flaw worth living with (there is certainly some merit in non-flow judging of debates). My ballot is based on the impression I have when the round ends- and there you have it. I was not impressed with the story. It made me think "this could be any war and says war is painful, so why again is war in Iraq justified?" Much of the 1AC did the same, which I will comment on at a more decent hour. Mike Cal 06
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