Stumble it!Daddy! Daddy! The neighbor is beating his wife!
posted in Iraq, Politics, War by themaiden |I got the same “Saddam is beating his wife” junk email now published at The Uncooperative Blogger. The analogy employed in this father/son morality myth is so flawed I wanted to rip my hair out when I read it.
The set-up: A man’s son asked why we went to war in Iraq. The man responds by telling a little ad hoc parable. He tells his kid to imagine that “our house and our yard is the United States of America and you are President Bush” and that “every house and yard on this block is a different country.” The little boy, by the way, giggles at pretending to be President Bush. How damned cute.
“Now I want you to stand there and look out the window and pretend you see Saddam come out of his house with his wife, he has her by the hair and is hitting her. You see her bleeding and crying. He hits her in the face, he throws her on the ground, then he starts to kick her to death. Their children run out and are afraid to stop him, they are screaming and crying, they are watching this but do nothing because they are kids and they are afraid of their father. You see all of this, son…. what do you do?”
So, wife beating. Very bad. What now? Well, you call the police.
Pretend that the police are the United Nations. They take your call. They listen to what you know and saw but they refuse to help.
Oh gosh! The police don’t want to help! Its not their job.
They don’t want to, son, because they say that it is not their place or your place to get involved and that you should stay out of it.
But wait, it gets worse.
Now I want you to look out that window and pretend you see our neighbor who you’re pretending is Saddam turn around and do the same thing to his children.
Now Saddam is beating his kids. What to do? Obviously, you muster up a posse.
Well, if the police don’t want to help, I will go and ask my next door neighbor to help me stop him.
But that doesn’t work. The neighbor doesn’t want to help. And… oh no!
… the man across the street saw you ask for help and saw that no one would help you stop him. He stands taller and puffs out his chest…. He walks across the street to the old lady’s house and breaks down her door and drags her out, steals all her stuff and sets her house on fire and then… he kills her. He turns around and sees you standing in the window and laughs at you. WHAT DO YOU DO?
Now Saddam is stealing things from the neighbors.
WHAT DO YOU DO? WHAT DO YOU DO? Isn’t the suspense just killing you?
And then…
… that man…… he’s at your front door…
Hannibal… oh sorry… Saddam is at the gates.
WHAT DO YOU DO?
I DEFEND MY FAMILY DAD!!! I’M NOT GONNA LET HIM HURT MOMMY OR MY SISTER, DAD!!! I’M GONNA FIGHT HIM DAD, I’M GONNA FIGHT HIM!!!!!
But…
It’s too late to fight him, he’s too strong, and he’s already at YOUR front door, son… you should have stopped him BEFORE he killed his wife, his children, and the old lady across the way.
… alas… its too late. We would have had to go fight him way back at the beginning of the story. Now we can’t do anything. Oops!
The moral? Pre-emptive warfare solves all our problems? If we feel threatened by someone we should go beat them up?
I began, though, by saying that the analogy is flawed. How so?
Flaw Number 1: It is profoundly wrong to compare nations to individual houses on a block. Nations are not like houses. Nations are vastly more complicated in just about every way. For example, a team could stake out a house and get very nearly 100 percent accurate information about the activities within. This is impossible with a nation, especially when that nation is largely closed off. It is a scalability issue, really. Comparing the two is like comparing a Inuit Kayak with the Queen Mary. There are some similarities but you are idiot if you think the analogy yields much information of value.
A more appropriate analogy a nation would be a whole neighborhood of thousands of houses occupied by people of various political, religious and ethnic bents.
Flaw Number 2: It is wrong to compare a national government and its people to an abusive husband and his wife and children. Again it is a scalability problem. A man might successfully abuse his wife and half a dozen kids but no national leader has ever had that kind of solitary power– not Hitler, not Stalin, not the Sun King, no one. The significance of this is that it means that some of the ‘children’ are cooperating with the government. Some of the children are part of the government, in other words, and may be quite happy with that arrangement. More importantly, perhaps, on a national scale not everyone is going to fit into either the category ‘co-conspirator’ or ‘victim’. Some are going to be somewhere in between and largely unaffected. Some are going to be actively resisting. Some are going to be passively resisting. Some may not care.
“But you still have an oppressive regime,” you say. True, but make an appropriate analogy and face the facts. Don’t construct an absurdly simplistic fairy tale and pretend it is a good guide to action.
An appropriate analogy would be something more like this: A man, along with hundreds of neighbors, has taken control of a neighborhood of thousands of households. This man and his cronies are in fact abusing some of the people in the neighborhood, but it is somewhat difficult to determine exactly how many because the neighborhood is large and spread out and intelligence is hard to get. It is clear though that large segments of the neighborhood’s people are going about life as normal– work, play, family and such like. Now, how do you solve that problem? Guns and tanks? Not so obviously. Imagine this kind of situation in your neighborhood. Bombs kill everyone. Bullets kill everyone. Marching though a neighborhood with an army is not like storming a house with a SWAT team. Storming a house effects, arguably, only the victims and the perpetrator. Storming a neighborhood is a lot more complicated. Innocent people get killed and even if you do happen to be a victim you stand a good chance of loosing your house, your family, your job, even your life in the process of being rescued. That is the harsh reality that this abusive husband analogy glosses over. This is not a John Wayne rescuing the damsel situation. It doesn’t work that way in the real world.
Flaw Number 3: Whatever Hussein’s crimes, they were nowhere near as obvious as is the crime of a man beating and killing his wife in his front yard. Making the comparison creates a false sense of certainty, but why paint in color when you can force everything into black and white?
Flaw Number 4: The UN in not primarily a police force. Not really. It was not constituted that way, though it has a police wing. The UN is primarily a diplomatic body. However, pretending that the UN is more or less a ‘cops on call’ organization allows the claim that the UN didn’t do its job, which in turn provides a justification for the vigilante justice that is the ultimate goal of this father/son tear-jerker. Put another way, if you call the cops– even assuming the UN had such resources– and they say they can’t help you are not automatically justified in forming an armed militia.
Complaining about the UN’s lack of activity is weird in another way. Claiming that the UN is an international police force is like claiming that the UN is an international government. Now, anyone want to guess at the standard right wing response to such a suggestion?
Flaw Number 5: It is wrong to pretend that a police force could do what was needed to oust Hussein. You can’t police a nation from the outside unless that nation is 1) sufficiently fractured already that no strong opposition exists or 2) the government agrees to let you police the country. Otherwise, you have to send an army. But justifying an armed invasion is a bigger trick than calling up the UN and asking for cops.
Flaw Number 6: The UN did, in fact, do its job in Iraq. Hussein was contained. He was no threat to anyone outside of Iraq, and he was generally well behaved. Pompous? Yes. Mouthy? Yes. Dangerous? Nope.
Flaw Number 7: In context, claiming that the neighbors didn’t help seems to suggest that the neighbors saw what was going on but refused to help out of fear or cowardice or some similar unflattering emotion. It begs the question of what the neighbors saw. It is quite possible that the refusal to help had something to do having a different vantage point. This would not be at all surprising since the Bush Team fabricated most of their evidence for the war.
Flaw Number 8: Saddam was not pillaging other nations. He was contained. He tried more than a decade ago to pillage, but he got his ass kicked in short order. Consequently, the implied ‘domino effect’ argument– if we leave him be he’ll take more and more and more stuff so we have to stop him now– is just nonsense. When he actually did try something like this he got backhanded into submission.
Flaw Number 9: Saddam was damn sure no threat to the United States– “he’s at your front door…” my ass.
Flaw Number 10: If you wait too long you can’t stop him. BS. That is giving Hussein too much credit. Really, it a bit shameful that the US got itself so worked up over a petty dictator who’d already had the balls cut off his military. This is the nation who took down both Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan at the same time. And in both cases we waited until those nations were pillaging other nation before we took action. I don’t want to argue that waiting that long was the right thing to do, but the case does prove my point: We stopped these two nations after they did make it, almost, to our gates and each alone was orders of magnitude stronger that Hussein. “We had to go to war when we did or he wins” is thus just an absurd position.
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