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Politics : Foreign Policy Discussion Thread

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To: Alastair McIntosh who wrote (3850)	2/13/2003 7:09:11 AM
From: zonder	Read Replies (3) of 15987

It does look like he was either misled and believed wrong information or deliberately lied, as you suggest. Two things: (1) One person having said something that was later proven wrong does not mean that the world should sneer at everything he ever says from that point onwards until the end of his life. ex 1: Colin Powell praised a British "intelligence report" in front of the UN Security Council as a "fine paper ... which describes in exquisite detail Iraqi deception activities." It was later proved to be plagiarised from a student's paper on 12-year old data, ripped from an Israeli website. asia.cnn.com So Powell was misled on info he thought was correct, or lied. Are we to think everything he ever says from now on are lies? ex 2: International Atomic Energy Agency said that a report cited by President Bush as evidence that Iraq in 1998 was "six months away" from developing a nuclear weapon does not exist. "There's never been a report like that issued from this agency," Mark Gwozdecky, the IAEA's chief spokesman, said washtimes.com Unless you want to argue that Bush THOUGHT he saw a paper that did not exist, he lied (not even misled or said something he thought was correct). Can we never believe another word he utters? (2) Attacking the person presenting the argument rather than the argument itself is one of the simplest logical fallacies - Ad Hominem. I don't know what else to say on this subject, except that it is getting rather frustrating to see ad hominem become a normal mode of communication, not only on SI but in international politics. A recent example was how France and Germany became dubbed "old Europe" and their arguments were not even addressed, right after they presented arguments against the invasion of Iraq.

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