Well said - thank you.

BTW there's a spurious "I would be much" in your penultimate paragraph.

Yup, that'll do it. You have my apprecaiiton.

I agree - it is ad hominem. My mother has always driven me slightly crazy with the same fallacy - for her, everyone she disagrees with is a hypocrite. (I happen to agree with her on many issues, which makes the weakness of the arguments much more infuriating.) Her objection to bin Laden, for example, is that he's not willing to go blow himself up -- as though it would make what he advocates more acceptable if he were.

Wars are catastrophes. Occasionally they are needed in order to prevent greater catastrophes. I have the greatest respect for soldiers - I would have made a piss-poor one even when I was of the age to fight in wars, and I remain pleasantly surprised to this day that Reagan did not manage to draft me to go off and die somewhere. But the men and women who are willing to do it - wow. That you aren't one isn't a comment on your character.

So it's a silly argument. If a given war is a good idea, it is a good idea, regardless of whether the person advocating it is suited for military service. Likewise, if it's a bad idea, it's a bad idea, and the case can and should be made that it's a bad idea without having to make the argument personal.

(Making the case that a given war of choice is a bad idea is not, in general, hard, or at least shouldn't be; I am unpleasantly confused by living in a culture where sometimes it is. Wars kill lots of people. Choosing to fight a war has basically the same cost as choosing to infect your nation with a plague. The rationale for it has to be really strong, and the consequences of not going to war extremely certain -- to justify that. Or should be. Why anyone has to resort to ad hominem attacks to make the case for not infecting your own community with a plague is quite beyond me.)

And on the merits, I would like to see us support the Libyan rebels in some way. I am very dubious that doing so in a direct military capacity is likely to work, because people who were certain military involvement was a good idea have not been right, lately. The bar should be very high. But we should find a way to support them.

It is quite surprising that you need to sit down and explain what you just explained. But you did it well, and thank you for it.

And hey, they passed the no fly zone resolution!

Good to hear about the No Fly Zone resolution. UN gears turning slowly; hopefully not too slow.

So are we going to park a carrier in the Gulf Of Sidra and start shooting down MiGs like its the 80s again? (Serious question.)

IMHO, the problem with this back in 2002/2003 was that so many of the Republican "hawks" had worked very, very hard to avoid military service. The canonical example, of course, is Dick Cheney with his five draft deferments. What made Iraq so very special was the huge number of people who had performed enormous acts of cowardice during the Vietnam war, (which they also supported but were unwilling to fight in...) who were perfectly happy to send someone else out to die.

We're not talking about the occasional person who thought that Vietnam was a bad idea and Iraq wasn't. We're talking about virtually the entire leadership of the Republican Party working extremely hard to avoid military service, then universally declaring for a completely useless war.

When you're dealing with one person at a time, your point is extremely pertinent. When you're dealing with an entire group of people and all of them have behaved the same way, the conclusion that there is a pattern is almost unavoidable.

Google the term "chickenhawk" for more on this.

I think part of it was also the appeal to patriotism and militarism. If these people had just said "I was a coward, but I still think this is the right thing to do, and luckily we don't have a draft now so it's different", I could keep some respect for them. What really did it for me was their argument that "If you object to this you hate America and the military and you're cowardly."

It is, however, important to remember that this is basically ad hominem: it's a strong argument that certain people who supported the Iraq War were jerks, but not in itself an argument against the Iraq War.

There are some basic issues with this post. Let me first cover the minor ones:
1. Credit when you quote.
2. Don't open your mother up to cheap shots from anonymous strangers on the Internet. Seriously.
3. Don't call your opposition's arguments "spurious". In fact, don't call them anything - a refutation is enough.

Now for the meat of it:

1. The key difference between social workers and soldiers is that the latter are _expected_ to kill and be killed. The former are not. A decision to put someone in that position is different from a decision to put someone in a position where they might have to hand out a welfare check. (The same applies to policemen, but takes longer to go over. Note that when a policemen kills or is killed in the course of duty there is generally a trial).

2. A decision to go to war almost instantly becomes irreversible (the moment the first person dies. Once they're dead you can't change it). On the other hand, a decision to hand out welfare can easily be reversed.

3. Notice, I said "kill", not just "be killed" in point 1 above. That's because when there's a war civilians and enemy soldiers also get killed. Are you sure that the particular fifteen-year-old drafted into the army by the Evil Bad Guys deserves to die? How about his family? If you are, you should be sure enough to look them in the eye and take personal responsibility for their deaths.

4. Wars (unlike policing and welfare) often involve drafts. You are a doctor and probably in your late twenties at least, so you're not likely to be drafted unless the enemy is right here, on the shore, which is unlikely. But someone who is not a professional soldier and did not have your advantages (brain, money, upbringing, time to go to school - you name it) is. Someone voted for Vietnam and did not go. Someone else did not vote, because they were under age, went, and stayed.
Yes, you covered this in your argument, but you ignored the fundamental difference between parting with some of one's money (libraries) and parting with one's life. The latter is, again, irreversible.

5. "If my neighbor was being tortured and murdered by a violent psychopath"
Your neighbor isn't. Instead, your neighbor is being tortured and murdered by his neighbor, who is a draftee and will be shot if he refuses. If you call the "police" they will not kill "a violent psychopath". They will kill a bunch of your neighbors _and_, possibly, with luck one violent psychopath.

1. From the post above: "From the comments yesterday" is a reference to the original source of the quote, which any reader can access by clicking that little "previous post" button on the top of the entry.

Welcome to the internet, where a reference to an original source is sufficient credit.

Moreover, by linking to the original source rather than your name, Scott has left you with the power to extricate yourself from credit (by deleting the comment) should you ever decide that the attention generated by the credit is unwanted.

I realize that it's hard to imagine others might not resemble you, but basic rules do not change with technology for everyone, nor does everyone feel the need to whitewash even the recent past.

Well said.

"A three-hundred-sided dice" should be "a three-hundred-sided die".

Of course you can support war and not be a soldier in the same way that you can support the existence of police forces and not be a policeman.

The thing is, though, if you're not a soldier you may not be very knowledgeable about war. You are certainly not in a position to make claims about what it feels like to be in a war. So your estimation of how bad war is for participants is likely to be skewed. War is famously hard to understand without firsthand experience -- even non-soldiers have usually heard this from soldiers' memoirs. So if you wouldn't be a soldier, it's a bit unseemly to be a very confident hawk (or pacifist, for that matter) and if you're as far removed from war as most civilians and you happen to be making military policy, you should be RIDICULOUSLY circumspect. It's impossible to avoid making decisions that affect other people's lives, but we can at least make an attempt to avoid being excessively blithe about things that kill people.