The Big Lie - Iraq - Again

I have been writing a series of How to Talk diaries. The goal of these diaries is to enable us to have successful conversations with people who should be agreeing with us, but do not yet.

One of the standard features of this series is a section called Mangle the Memes. This section gives us some tools to deal with the lock step counter arguments framed by the Right Wing Smear Machine, which is famous for generating and propagating The Big Lie.

This diary is going to deal with the current Big Lie - the consequences of a rapid pull out from Iraq. Want to know how to mangle this meme? Then follow me down the rabbit hole...


A Google search on "house republican consequences" yields 1,290,000 hits. I am not about to list them all, but I do want to focus on a couple of key points inside The Big Lie:

• a swift U.S. pullout
• Portrayal of Republican talking points as the only possible outcome

these are the two key points inside The Big Lie. In the initial How To Talk diary I defined Mangle the Memes:

The other side is not going to take all this lying down. They are going
to counter attack you with their favorite memes. You are going to counter attack them by never letting a meme go unchallenged. You have already defined your
terminology. You can mix up your counterattacks by using your predefined
terminology in response to their memes, or you can turn their own memes back on
them. Use either of these tactics, or both. You will confound your opposition
and carry the day

So lets take on the first of the key points above - a swift U.S. pullout.

Here is the first lie within The Big Lie. The other side is portraying calls for a withdrawal from Iraq as a swift U.S. pullout. The lie is no one is calling for a swift pullout. Rep. John Murtha got the pullout ball rolling in 2005 as reported by Fox Noise:

Murtha, a Pennsylvania Democrat and decorated Marine Corps veteran who served in the Vietnam War, last week urged the withdrawal of all U.S. troops within six months.

Is 6 months your idea of swift? Here is how the President talked about Murtha and his proposal:

Congressman Murtha is a fine man, a good man, who served our country with honor and distinction as a Marine in Vietnam and as a United States congressman.
He is a strong supporter of the United States military. And I know the decision
to call for an immediate withdrawal of our troops...

An immediate withdrawal of our troops from Iraq will only strengthen the terrorists' ... they can turn Iraq into what Afghanistan was under the Taliban, a safe haven for terror, a place where they can plot and plan attacks against America

Even Harvard's Nieman Watchdog has fallen into the immediate pullout trap. Consider this:

General William Odom, one of the earliest advocates of an immediate withdrawal

Here is General Odom's earliest statement on this subject as reported by the Nieman Watchdog:

debating an early pullout. Many US officers in Iraq, especially
at company and field grade levels, know that while they are winning every tactical battle, they are losing strategically.

How does debating an early pullout become one of the earliest advocates of an immediate withdrawal?

The very next Odom article published by the Nieman Watchdog, describes Odom's previous article

as get out of Iraq now

The real problem here is that Odom did not say that. Odom went form calling for debating an early pullout to one of the earliest advocates of an immediate withdrawal in a span of just over 15 months. Nowhere in this period does the Nieman Watchdog report Odom actually calling for an immediate withdrawal

So there is lie number one. General Odom calls for debating an early pullout. This is turned into one of the earliest advocates of an immediate withdrawal. John Murtha's call for withdrawal of all U.S. troops within six months is turned into an immediate withdrawal by no less than the President of the United States.

Once we understand what the lie is, refuting it becomes a fairly straightforward exercise. Whenever you hear someone describing an immediate withdrawal, stop them right there. Ask them who is proposing an immediate withdrawal. They will not be able to give you a name. If they try to give you a name, ask them to supply a link or some other documentation. Accept only direct quotes attributed to that name. These can not be supplied because they do not exist.

That should be enough to end the conversation right there. You will have defeated the premise of the argument for all these dire consequences to necessarily follow.

In the next installment of the Big Lie, we will see how to defeat the cause - effect argument for a non-existent immediate withdrawal from Iraq.

Values Based Foreign Policy

As the 110th Congress is getting ready to come into session, I have been thinking quite a bit about a Values Based Foreign Policy. The Democrats in Congress have been shut out of any meaningful role in US foreign policy for six long years. Now, with the advent of Democrats in control of Congress seems to me a good a time as any to write about how we define our foreign policy parameters.

I will confess first that I have been thinking about this in terms of Values Based Decision Making, but otherwise within the vacumn of my own little noggin. A little research quickly showed me that, once again, I have not come up with anything particularly original. But I still believe a discussion of this topic is particularly timely. So, here we go...


I had intended to start this diary off with a discussion of the famous "Long Telegram" by George Keenan which was published in Foreign Affairs in July 1947 as The Sources of Soviet Conduct by X. It was in this article that the policy of "Containment" of the Soviet Union was first and most famously espoused. I was, in fact, all set to blame Keenan for all the sins against "values based foreign policy" committed in the name of "containment". Imagine my surprise then upon re-reading this article and discovering this:

It is rather a question of the degree to which the United States can create among the peoples of the world generally the impression of a country which knows what it wants, which is coping successfully with the problems of its internal life and with the responsibilities of a world power, and which has a spiritual vitality capable of holding its own among the major ideological currents of the time. (Emphasis mine)

And this, the conclusion of the article:

Thus the decision will really fall in large measure on this country itself. The issue of Soviet-American relations is in essence a test of the overall worth of the United States as a nation among nations. To avoid destruction the United States need only measure up to its own best traditions and prove itself worthy of preservation as a great nation.

Surely, there was never a fairer test of national quality than this. In the light of these circumstances, the thoughtful observer of Russian-American relations will find no cause for complaint in the Kremlin's challenge to American society. He will rather experience a certain gratitude to a Providence which, by providing the American people with this implacable challenge, has made their entire security as a nation dependent on their pulling themselves together and accepting the responsibilities of moral and political leadership that history plainly intended them to bear.

In essence, Keenan was saying that we only had to live up to our values to ultimately prevail. Forty years later, in 1987, Keenan had this to say about "containment":

There are many other sources of instability and trouble. There are local danger spots scattered about in the Third World. There is the dreadful situation in southern Africa. There is the grim phenomenon of a rise in several parts of the world of a fanatical and wildly destructive religious fundamentalism, and there is the terrorism to which that sort of fundamentalism so often resorts. There is the worldwide environmental crisis, the rapid depletion of the world's nonrenewable energy resources, the steady pollution of its atmosphere and its waters -- the general deterioration of its environment as a support system for civilized living.

And finally, there is much in our own life, here in this country, that needs early containment. It could, in fact, be said that the first thing we Americans need to learn to contain is, in some ways, ourselves: our own environmental destructiveness, our tendency to live beyond our means and to borrow ourselves into disaster, our apparent inability to reduce a devastating budgetary deficit, our comparable inability to control the immigration into our midst of great masses of people of wholly different cultural and political traditions.

At this juncture, I was going to launch into my own discussion of the pitfalls of the so called "pragmatic approach" to foreign policy versus the "values based" model. I still intend to do so in future diaries. I would be entirely remiss if, at this time, I did not offer my apologies to the late George Keenan, a man who 60 years ago typed these words on his typewriter:

gratitude to a Providence which, by providing the American people with this implacable challenge, has made their entire security as a nation dependent on their pulling themselves together and accepting the responsibilities of moral and political leadership