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An Intellectually Dishonest Attack

I have noticed that since President Bush introduced his idea of sending 20,000 additional troops to help contain the civil war in Iraq, he has introduced an interesting attack on those who disagree with his plan. For instance, just this morning the president said the following:

“I know there is skepticism and pessimism and that some are condemning a plan before it’s even had a chance to work,” the president said. “They have an obligation and a serious responsibility therefore to put up their own plan as to what would work.”

He has said this repeatedly in the last couple of weeks, and I am interested the White House has chosen to pursue this line of attack on their detractors. I’m interested because this attack is as nakedly intellectually dishonest as these types of statements get. Because as soon as someone responds with, “My plan is to redeploy the troops, so that some of them are going to Afghanistan, and the other active theaters in the war on terror and the other troops are coming back home”, the president responds with, “That’s not a plan for success. That’s a plan for failure.”

When the president talks about his opponents offering “their own plan as to what would work”, he is implicitly defining “what would work” to mean a plan that keeps troops on the streets of the cities of Iraq. Any plan that takes troops off those streets equals a failure of the war in the president’s eyes, and such a plan would not “work”. So it’s intellectually dishonest to demand an alternative from people who have already provided said alternative, because you have limited this option out by the words you use to make the demand.

It’s the classic “heads up I win, tails up you lose” situation. The president is upset that people criticize his plan without offering plans of their own, but as soon as someone offers a plan of their own, the president says that’s not a real plan because it won’t “work”. Rather than actually making a case for why his plan will work, the president is relying on an intellectually dishonest line of attack on his detractors so that his choice seems like the only option.

Fortunately, many Americans now realize that following the president blindly when it comes to Iraq hasn’t worked out that well so far:

A Times/Bloomberg poll last week found that 62% of those surveyed said the war was not worth fighting, and only one-third approved of the president’s handling of the war. Three out of five respondents said they disapproved of Bush’s plan to send an additional 21,500 U.S. troops to Iraq, and about half said they wanted Congress to prevent the deployment.