Here are my points, I’m not saying I totally believe all these things, but they are questions I have:
1) There can be a different moral judgment made for someone’s decision-making and what actually happens. For example someone could invent a chemical for domestic use. 150 years after they die, that chemical could become weaponised and kills many innocent people. So you could say 1) the inventor bears no moral responsibility for the deaths, but 2) it would have been better if the chemical was never invented. Similarly you could say 1) Blair should be condemned for not exhausting peaceful options (if the inquiry is to be believed) for the goals he wanted to achieve, but 2) knowing what we know now from the Arab Spring there is a distinct possibility that the Iraq war was for the best (of course, there is still the distinct possibility it was for the worse).
2) The Syrian situation is worse than the Iraq situation. When using the same methodology, the fatalities in the Syrian conflict are higher than in Iraq. Similarly there are more refugees in the Syrian situation than the Iraq conflict (I think?). Per capita these disparities are even greater.
3) Iraq may well have had a Syrian-style conflict during the Arab spring. This would likely result in more deaths than the Iraq war.
Again none of this is rationale for the decision making, as it is based on what we know now and not what they new at the time.
Its retroactive moral justification and those are simply not credible claims. Anything
could have happened. You cannot also disentangle the Arab spring from the destabilisation caused by Iraq. Without Iraq there may not have been any civil war. One thing we do know is that the actions that
were taken resulted in a predictably huge loss of life and destabilisation - as wars almost always do
911 was an appalling act of terror and set in motion a chaotic sequence of terrible events, but given that the US has been responsible for tens of millions of deaths prior to this, and that 911 seems to have set the US on a downward spiral of military and financial overstretch and inevitable collapse, by your logic it was the right thing to do.
Are you familiar with chaos theory, Lorenz and the butterfly effect? Do you read alt-history? The fundamental premise, articulated by everyone from the odious Niall Ferguson to the sublime Kim Stanley Robinson, from military historian to sci-fi author is this: The further away you get from an event the more difficult it is to extrapolate likely outcomes.
Perhaps a sum over histories had bunched the probabilities. Is this likely? We don’t know. We are particles, moving in a wave. The wave breaks. No math can predict which bubbles will appear where. But there is a sum over histories. Chaotic systems fall into patterns, following the pull of strange attractors. Linear chaotic figures look completely non-repetitive, but slice them into Poincaré sections and they reveal the simplest kinds of patterns. There is a tide, and we float in it; perhaps it is the flux of the cosmos itself; swim this way or that, the tide still carries us to the same destination. Perhaps.
The basic premise of Blair's argument is fatally flawed. It is morally, logically
and practically bankrupt. You need to read this as soon as possible:
http://www.baen.com/Chapters/1597801844/1597801844___6.htm
I’ve been getting into a debate on dissensus pretty much every week this past month or so. I want to cool off for a bit, so hopefully we can get this one done today.
lol. Come back to me in ten years.
