When engaged in an adversarial debate, participants use the weapon of analogy in an attempt to influence the audience into accepting their proposition. It has been proven particularly effective, given our inherent human urge to correlate something new and unfamiliar with something old and comfortable.
And although this type of argumentation can be quite useful, it can also be corrupted, which has certainly been the case with politicians and policy makers who continue to wage a non-stop war against logic in the realm of political discourse.
The most recent offender was Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld when he claimed turning our backs on postwar Iraq today would be the modern equivalent of handing postwar Germany back to the Nazis. Although the Nazis have been the most commonly used degrading analogy between the Left and Right, comments like these are part of a long line of illogical analogies proposed by the right-wingers in support of the Iraq War. The two most notable have been comparisons of the current state of Iraq to the American Revolution and World War II.
This means one of two things. Either it demonstrates a fundamental misunderstanding of the new geopolitical situation of the 21st century, or it represents a willful manipulation of truth in pursuit of agenda. Whether it's ignorance or malevolence, problems abound.
Beginning with the American Revolution analogy, it doesn't take a historical scholar to note that the American colonies gained independence from a mother country, not a past regime of an already established nation-state. This is significant because, during the 18th century, the American colonies had developed a unified sense of identity in direct contrast to England, whose values colonists had transformed into their own, including ethnic diversification, religious pluralism, free-market capitalism and a uniquely American ideal of individualism. The colonies certainly had their differences, but they were never as extreme as the current factions of Iraq. The Presbyterians never practiced mass genocide on the Puritans, nor did Methodists wage war against Anglicans or Quakers, as has been the case of the factions in Iraq through its troubled history.
Without a history of violent conflict between religious sects, it was possible, and much easier, for the deeply religious American colonies to work together to find common ground for establishing a government while forming a unified sense of identity simultaneously. Iraq, on the other hand, has a much more tragic and complex history of violence, making the possibility of a peaceful, republican form of government emerging much more difficult. It might be impossible, but those who attempt to compare the Iraqi situation to the days of the American colonies are mistaken, na+
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Thomas Hill
