Faulty Logic

It's tempting to take potshots at those who think our justification for going to war vanished with the failure to find stockpiles of chemical, biological, or nuclear weapons in Iraq.

Andrea Harris fired off this salvo:

I have a question on this WMD thing. So, apparently we are now concluding that Hussein did not, in fact, have a huge stash of nuclear weapons aimed at New York and Washington DC. That’s a good thing, isn’t it? It means that the thing the administration wanted to prevent was, in fact, prevented, and not only that, a dangerous troublemaker has been removed from power in a very unstable region.

Not so fast. Read James Joyner's amusing response at Outside the Beltway.

Arguments like Andrea's miss the point - they presume that the only good reason for military intervention was the threat of nuclear attack (the imminence argument again). There are plenty of valid reasons to support the decision to go to war without resorting to faulty logic and buying into a line of reasoning (the imminent danger theory) that was explicitly rejected by the administration.

Update: Two posters (Paul and MathMom) correctly pointed out that Andrea did not say that nuclear attack was the only rationale for war. I understood this, but was myself! sloppy in my wording, so I must apologize to Andrea. What I should have said is that I worry that arguments like that only lend credence to the imminence argument in the minds of people who aren't paying attention (which seems to include people like me). Mea culpa. I still think James is correct in questioning the logic behind the second part of her statement.

- posted by Cassandra