Iraq War: The "will" to believe

Josh Marshall last week addressed the general issue of blowhard hawk rhetoric about showing “will” in Iraq in a sensible way.

As he put it in part:

...[O]rotund, abstract language can obfuscate accountability, truth-telling, and as we're now seeing most clearly, the simple facing of reality. And, boy, are we there today -- with the repeated incantations of vague phrases which can mean anything and thus also nothing.

Why are things spinning out of control in Iraq? Why are we losing the struggle for hearts and minds in the country? Because we stand for freedom. And the terrorists hate freedom. And they're attacking us because we're bringing freedom to Iraq. And terrorists hate freedom. Therefore they hate us. And since they hate us so much of course they fight us.

There are, of course, many levels of discourse in politics and war, from the simple to the complex to the very complex.  A politician’s stump speech typically relies on phrases that have some generally accepted meaning, such as “more consideration for families with children in the tax code.”  A magazine article may talk about the various alternatives being debated in Congress at a given moment for changes in the tax code.  While the legislative analysts will have to look at obscure details of the language of the bill and report on it in language that may be fully intelligible only to tax attorneys or tax accountants.

The problem comes when the policy-makers and scholars (or what passes for scholars at advocacy agencies like the American Enterprise Institute) start assuming that the vague slogans define reality in ways that are both meaningful and actionable.  Which I suppose could serve as a definition of dogmatism.

When that happens, we get disasters like the Bush Administration has created in Iraq.