MORPHING

The study by a U of I college student finding 23 rationales for war with Iraq used by the administration -- all before the war -- made it's way around the blogosphere once before, but now it's in a WaPo column, so it will get far wider circulation.

The first thing to note is that the argument that WMD was the rationale for war is false.

The second thing to note is that the arguments about humanitarian intervention and about spreading democracy in the Mideast only coming out once it began to look as if WMD would not be found are also false.

Third, when this study was mentioned before, the idea that a Sept. 11 link was brought up by the press was not mentioned. But I understand this completely. The President raises Sept. 11 constantly, but as a basis for the permanent alteration of what we can accept in terms of risk -- and what that means in terms of the threshold for necessary evidence before war becomes an option, or necessary. It was then, I bet, the press who began interpreting that as an argument about Saddam ordering the planes into the Towers.

Now, all that having been said, there are different possibilities. Carol Winkler at Georgia State University has done amazing work tracking the way the justifications for Desert Storm shifted over the length of Desert Shield based on the way each justification was polling (but that work isn't available on-line.) Every White House polls, of course, and then modifies its message to an extent based on the results its getting, but this was just wild -- they were pitching and abandoning arguments wholesale. That isn't at all what this study says happened with the current White House, but until we have access to this White House's internal polls and internal speechwriter's memos, we won't be able to replicate the work Winkler has done.

We could (but who has the time) take each speech from the Sept. 12, 2002 UN speech forward and chart the justifications against, say, Gallup. It would only roughly proxy what we might guess was going on internally.

In any event, what she describes is not a wholesale use of trial balloons that are then abandoned, but a long list of arguments, used in a kalidioscope of combinations, some of which have then morphed or fallen by the wayside since the fall of Baghdad. What we really need, until we can replicate the Winkler study, is for someone to repeat this study for the time frame since the start of combat.

Comments

[Byron]

Opponents of this war want to treat the various reasons for it as if they subtract from one another or cancel each other out. One reason is better than two, and three is worse yet. They seem to believe that a table balanced on one leg is preferable to a table resting on many legs. I can't find any sense in that way of thinking. Put that together with an unwillingness or inability to think in terms of short-term and long-term rationales, and you have a recipe for a peculiarly incoherent opposition, one that cannot produce a serious and systematic critique. The problem, of course, is that it's really all about Bush, not about the war itself.

[Marc]

http://www.pol.uiuc.edu/news/largio.htm

Above is the link to the study itself, it's lengthy but has a summarized section as well. Following line from the WaPo article, reflecting one of the twenty-three rationales, is one that isn't discussed much in print or on the pundit circuit.

"... compensating for international institutions so ineffectual as to render the phrase 'United Nations resolution' an oxymoron."

[Athena]

I wish I could write a thesis that got coverage like this.

[Athena]

i meant: *gets coverage like this*

maybe i should learn proper english first

[dauber]

It had occured to me (hint hint) that somebody could build on that thesis in very interesting ways to proxy the work Winkler did until the classified files become open. Thanks for the cite on the thesis itself.

[marky48]

See that's the difference. I think those first two premises are true not false as you claim. It's a classic example of moving the goal to fit the formula. As a scientist that doesn't cut it and it shows. Bush loses because of it. I didn't make the calls. He did. You bought the ticket you take the ride. Home, in this case for him.