Flame — HabitableZone

Flame » in reply to Actually...

Spurious specificity
Robert — (archived)

Talk about moving the goalposts...it's intellectually dishonest to maintain that those who opposed the war were wrong because they weren't able to predict in precise detail the shape of the disaster.

As far as I'm concerned, the feeling that "oh gawd, this can't possibly turn out well" counts. Judgments that invading Iraq was a mistake were often founded on a perception of incompetence and dishonesty, and ideological and hidden agendas, in the Bush Administration; those were judgments based on first principles.

If you're shopping for a plumber, it's sufficient to reject a candidate based on incompetence or lack of integrity. You don't have to predict which pipes will leak and which toilet will overflow, nor predict to the minute how late he'll be showing up for the job, nor predict to the penny how much you'll be overcharged.

And how dare you dismiss objections based on morality? RightWingers insist that their morality has concrete applications and consequences in the real world, but the principle that bad consequences flow from doing the wrong thing is a universal one.

Anyone who said that invading Iraq was wrong, no matter how it was expressed, was correct. Quibbling over the details can never change that.

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