Transnational Thursday is a thread for people to discuss international news, foreign policy or international relations history. Feel free as well to drop in with coverage of countries you’re interested in, talk about ongoing dynamics like the wars in Israel or Ukraine, or even just whatever you’re reading.
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This is a reverse Nirvana fallacy, justifying predictable missteps with a shrug and saying 'nobody is perfect'.
People demand a credible justification, a coherent goal, and a plausible argument that the goal is achievable. Comparing OIF to OEF is illustrative, in that Bush leveraged high public confidence and made a huge effort to sell the endeavor both domestically and internationally: Saddam is developing WMDs, we can stop this by getting rid of him, and we have the military force to do that (a lot of people still called BS and it turned out they were right, but public support at the time was high). By contrast, Trump has had his officials contradict themselves and each other several times a week as to why we're doing this, the goal is pretty vague, and their plans, such as they are, seem very reactive to extremely predictable problems. And this was carried out with zero effort to build support during a time when public trust is incredibly low.
The appeal of socialism is primarily that it promises
free stuffeconomic security and remediation against exploitative elites. Nobody cares about the plan.The word "credible" is load-bearing here - you just declare any justification "not credible" and demand another, can go forever this way.
Same here. Is a goal "diminish Iran's capacity of stirring shit up for years to go as much as possible" "coherent" or it must be "bring peace and happiness to all the world forever"?
Is the argument "this is actually being achieved in front of our own eyes" "plausible" or not? Of course you always can say no, not plausible, gimme another.
Wait wait, you're saying the fact that they are reacting to things that happen and actually change their actions in accordance with actual events that happen - is a bad thing? How do you usually handle it - do you ignore things that happen and never change any initial plan no matter what?
Support from whom? Would France or Germany go for war with Iran if we asked really nice? Or maybe the Islamic Republic of Britain would? Maybe Spain? Italy? There's a lot of support from one ally - Israel - who do a lot of the work, but that leads only to various conspiracy accusations.
If the plan works, that is. Which it never does.
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