43 Killed, 70 Wounded by Bus Bomber
And Rumsfeld's False Analogy
A suicide bomber jumped on a bus in Baghdad just as it was about to head south for Nasiriyah on Thursday, eluding security. The bus was lifted by gigantic fingers of flame, reaching out to kill and wound bystanders, as well. Some 43 were killed and at least 70 wounded.
The news that Rumsfeld denied rumors on Thursday, that he was planning to step down tipped my memory to having heard him on the radio last week. (Too bad he won't go. He has been a perfect disaster.)
Rumsfeld complained at SAIS a week ago that there are 14,500 murders a year in the United States and 42,000 driving fatalities, and the US press isn't covering that, whereas, he implies, 43 people getting blown up on a bus in Baghdad is front page news.
Rumsfeld is committing a logical fallacy here. He is comparing apples and oranges. Does Rumsfeld think that there is not also a murder rate in Iraq beyond the guerrilla violence? The likelihood from the information that has leaked out from the Baghdad morgue is that Iraq is among the more murderous societies in the world at the moment. (As you would expect, since where there is no law and order, criminal elements act with impunity. Worse, there are regular political assassinations by religiious militias.) These Iraq murders are not usually reported in the press, any more than the murders in the US are. Likewise, one can only imagine the traffic death rate in Iraq. The country has imported more than 100,000 used cars since the fall of the old regime, and there aren't exactly a lot of vigilant traffic police.
So the fact is, Mr. Rumsfeld, that the per capita rates for murder and traffic deaths in Iraq may well be similar to those in the United States. The deaths in the guerrilla war are extra.
The essential fallacy here is comparing political violence, which aims at altering the government, to individual acts of criminality. Human beings are naturally focused on attempts to take over the leadership of a society. The bus bombing in Baghdad was carried out by Sunni Arab guerrillas whom Rumsfeld marginalized, and it was aimed at Shiites on their way to Nasiriyah in the Shiite south. It was a further attempt to provoke Shiite reprisals and ultimately a Sunni-Shiite civil war, in hopes that the resulting instability would allow the Sunni Arabs to make a coup and come back to power. A criminal slitting someone's throat in a back alley of Baghdad won't cause a civil war. Actions like the bus bombing are potentially consequential.
Likewise the US military attacks launched this week around Ramadi are not random acts of violence (and it is shocking that the Secretary of Defense should compare such military operations to a civilian felony!) The US military said, by the way, that the operation had resulted in no Iraqi or US deaths. [Though a guerrilla roadside bomb killed a GI in the Ramadi area on Thursday.) The military sweeps are attempts to weaken the guerrilla movement that is blowing up US troops. It is about shaping the government and polity of Iraq. Human beings are hardwired to be far more interested in attempts to change leadership in society than in individual random crime. Who rules Iraq affects everyone in the world. That the US has a remarkably high annual murder rate is of moment mainly to the victims and to the neighborhoods affected. By the way, the US murder rate is per capita 4 times that of Britain, and the likely explanation for the difference is the easy availability of non-sporting firearms, including especially pistols. Since Rumsfeld wants more coverage of the 14,500 murders a year in the US, would he welcome practical steps to make it more like 3,500? The British are not intrinsically nobler than the Americans-- our highly violent society is a result of specific structural features of our society.
In logic, Rumsfeld's mistake is known as the "false analogy." He incorrectly likens military violence to individual crime, and then expresses astonishment that the two things are not covered the same way by the press. Rumsfeld has a long track record of indulging in this particular form of sloppy thinking. He has also in the past made a false analogy between guerrilla violence in Iraq and race riots in small towns in the United States. In the terms of American racial discourse, that particular meme has overtones of bigotry, since he appears to be attempting to code the Sunni Arab guerrillas as "Black." (Or maybe it is the other way around.) It is all propaganda. It is shameful in a democratic society for the Secretary of Defense to engage in such warped discourse. It is more shameful that almost no one calls him on it.
posted by Juan Cole @ 12/09/2005 12:29:00 AM
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23 Comments:
Rumsfeld strategizes and thinks and rationalizes like a 7th grade boy on a junior debate team.
Dear Dr. Cole,
re: Rumsfeld's False Analogy
in addition to it being false logic,... the war that they have declared is a "War on Terror" –– not a war on traffic accidents, or a war on murder.
It is mind numbing,.. they create a war against a tactic - terrorist activities - (instead of the root causes of these activities) and then do not wish to be judged on their inability to control or reduce these activities,
it is beyond incompetent, it is senile.
I agree with you, that just once i would like to see a reporter with access call these guys on being so blatantly misleading.
thanks,..!
The ticking bomb of translation
Abarinov's justification for torture and "rendition "/1/ is written in Russian. This changes quite a lot - in English, this rant would be indistinguishable from the general stream of neoconservative PR stories. For example, Mr.Abarinov uses the infamous "ticking bomb argument". According to this logic, torture is justified to investigate and prevent imminent large scale terrorist attack - the "ticking bomb".
Legal, moral and historical considerations aside, this argumentation fails to account for escalation effect. Rebels do not hesitate to use and experience torture, so using it against them only escalates the conflict.
From the other side, intelligence extracted under torture is notoriously unreliable. In fact, its main usage is likley to be black PR rather than operational /2/.
The trick is, in Russian, Abarinov's argumentation looks almost original, readers of this article are not supposed to compare it with news stream in English.
The next step is to remember the recent scandal on propaganda planted in the Iraqi media. In both cases, translation effects work exactly the same way - Iraqis are not supposed to compare Arabic texts they read with English originals.
1. Grani. V.Abarinov. The ticking bomb of torture
2. NYT. DOUGLAS JEHL. Qaeda-Iraq Link U.S. Cited Is Tied to Coercion Claim
The Bush administration based a crucial prewar assertion about ties between Iraq and Al Qaeda on detailed statements made by a prisoner while in Egyptian custody who later said he had fabricated them to escape harsh treatment, according to current and former government officials.
The officials said the captive, Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, provided his most specific and elaborate accounts about ties between Iraq and Al Qaeda only after he was secretly handed over to Egypt by the United States in January 2002, in a process known as rendition.
3. Rick Jervis, Zaid Sabah. Probe into Iraq coverage widens
A U.S. investigation into allegations that the American military is buying positive coverage in the Iraqi media has expanded to examine a press club founded and financed by the U.S. Army.
The Baghdad Press Club was created last year by the U.S. military as a way to promote progress amid the violence and chaos of Iraq, said Lt. Col. Barry Johnson, a military spokesman.
Baghdad's "supsicious deaths" morque (its CSI setup, without the pretty investigators) had the city (population, what? 5 million?) on course for about 8,000 murders this year when i visited in early August. These numbers would include people murdered for all sorts of reasons (crime and political) and by all sorts of people, but do not include the victims of mass casualty attacks (like bombings). The july murder toll was a record for the city -- 1,080. The pre-war record, according to the morgue director, was about 250.
Through august the director was very open with the press. As far as i know, he still is.
Best
Dan
Another blot on Rumsfeld analogy: using this logic, the fewer than 3,000 people killed on September 11, 2001 should be considered "no big deal" since their number is far fewer than those other Americans killed that year, either by violence or traffic fatality. Yet reaction to this event has dominated American foreign policy since it occured. Indeed looking from the outside (in my case Canada), an observer sees that combination of vengence, sorrow, and fear that 9/11 has engendered dominates American culture now.
Another aspect of Rumsfeld's logical fallacy.... Using his reasoning, the fewer than 3,000 people killed on September 11, 2001 should be considered "no big deal" since their number is far fewer than those other Americans killed that year, either by violence or traffic fatality.
Yet reaction to this event has dominated American foreign policy since it occured. Indeed looking from the outside (in my case Canada), an observer sees that the sorrow, anger, and fear produced by 9/11 have come to dominate American culture.
American might is NOT used to stop internal violence or improve traffic safety. It is used to avenge 9/11.
JIM LEHRER w/ Donald Rumsfeld 8 Dec:
DONALD RUMSFELD: I don't know anybody who had any reasonable expectations about the number or the length of the war or the cost of the war. I just don't -- no one I know went out and said these are how those three metrics ought to be considered. And you can take it to the bank.
Comment: This man is a former corporate CEO. No business undertakes anything without estimating the costs. Rumsfeld is either lying or he's incompetent.
DONALD RUMSFELD: .......
And the thing that might be useful to talk about some night would be what would the world look like if we pulled out? What would the world look like if we quit and if we just tossed in the towel and said it's too tough?
JIM LEHRER: As you know there are many opinions on that. And --
DONALD RUMSFELD: And I think I know what the world would look like. You would have there a haven for terrorists. You would have a caliphate established by extremists. And it would be a threat to the American people, a greater threat to the American people unquestionably.
It is a country with water, a country with oil. And it would be a danger to the entire region. It would be a threat to the moderate Muslim regimes in that region and it would be an enormous victory for the violent extremists, as opposed to a victory for the moderate Muslims.
Comment: Rumsfeld has taken charge of the interview. More, he's using the mess, for which he's greatly responsible, to justify the very actions that made the mess.
If Mr. Rumsfeld's logic were to be followed, wouldn't the fact of 3000 being killed on 911 be less news worthy than the fact that 42,000 Americans died in road accidents the same year?
One could point out that by Rumsfeld's logic, the Sept 11th World Trade Center attacks were over-reported in the press as well. 3000 killed in the terrorist attacks vs 42000 killed annually in driving fatalities. Surely, by this reasoning, the World Trade Center attacks didn't deserve such extensive news coverage. Fault the liberal media.
Incidentally, I don't think Cole's description of people being hard-wired to pay more attention to politcally motivated killings is quite accurate. We pay more attention to those stories because we've learned to distinguish signal from noise. Figuring out what events are significant among the daily news is an aquired skill.
Not to mention, 43 deaths in Iraq per day would be 12 times higher of a murder rate per capita than the US (which already has an excessive rate) if the insurgency-caused deaths were the only ones occurring, which is obviously not the case.
It may be that Rumsfeld is trying to trivialize the violence in Iraq as part of the spin groundwork for troop withdrawal aka "cut and run".
By trivializing the violence he is making the case that the troops have pretty much finished the job they set out to do, and what's left is some cleanup work - easily handled by the Iraqis.
A few months ago I read a Rumsfeld quip (I can't remember where) to the affect that Iraq'a near term aspirations should be to emulate one of the Central American democracies. I think he mentioned El Salvador. Don't know if the Iraqis would see that as an acceptable target.
Last month the Baghdad coroner claimed nearly 8,000 deaths this year, the largest majority shootings. This does not include the bombings or the many people who take bodies directly to grave yards.
Roughly calculated Baghdad has a murder rate roughly 20 times that of the USA. One per thousand as opposed to one per twenty thousand.
Steven Vincent claimed several thousand murders per year by Shiite militias alone in Basra. Using higher population estimates (they vary form 1.2 to 2.5 million) this is also one murder per thousand per year.
These may not be typical for the country, but Rumsfeld should be grateful the crime rate is not frequently reported. That *he* could make such comparsons shows an appalling ignorance.
Thank you, Professor Cole, for your continued effort in bringing us real news from Iraq, as well as giving us context behind it.
Yeah, Rumsfeld is appalling. So are the other apologists re: dead in Iraq. I love the comment, "well, 2000 soldiers dead is quite a small number compared to previous American casualties of war."
Using that same logic, I wonder why the right keeps harping about a beheading or two? There can't have been more than a dozen reported. That's like...nothing!
Thanks for nailing that retort to those scummy folks who compare car bombs in Baghdad to car wrecks in California. I hope all the war aplogoists get this in their email.
The logical sophistry of this administration as a whole, and particularly in regards to the Iraq quagmire are simply to numerous to enumerate and debunk on a case by case basis. Your analysis of Rumsfelds fallacy is spot on, but you could fill your blog with 200 pages of post regarding 1/10th of the administrations illogic. The one that really chaps me is "we are fighting them over there so we don't have to fight them over here". This sounds great in a soundbite, but any logical analasys of the statement soon proves how absurd it really is. I mean the administration might as well declare "we are providing them American targets over there, so they don't try to target us here". Americans are dying either which way, assuming the worst were to happen if we weren't fighting them there. Regardless... thank you for pointing out another logical fallacy from the administration, and maybe someday someone will write a 3 volume discourse on all the other fallacies presented us by this administration.
At least a year ago Rumsfeld compared the rate of deaths of our soldiers to the US murder rate. Curiously, military recruiters have been known to tell young people that they would have more chance of dying in their local city than in Iraq.
A proper comparison has to start with the number of American soldiers in Iraq at any given time. The average has been around 140,000. There have been more than 2,000 deaths so far. The number of soldiers who have died while on active duty in Iraq is thus about 1 in 70. The population of the US is 2,000 times bigger. If you multiply more than 2,000 death times the size ratio of 2,000, you would have to have a murder total over two and a half years of over 4,000,000 victims in the US in order to say the rates are comparable.
As usual, Rumsfeld doesn't know what he's talking about.
The thing is, these people (Rumsfeld, Cheney, Bush, Bolton, Libby, Rove, ad nauseum) are ruthless criminals themselves. Some more witting than others, but they're all criminals. If justice were applied evenly in the US, they would all be behind bars, and most of them would be serious candidates for the death sentence for treason.
They say anything they think will help continue to hide that fact. They will say anything to get ahead, period. Who is left who trusts anything they say? The only thing you can do with their statements is analyze them for "between the lines" messages, etc. to get an idea of their real intent.
Sorry for the strong words, but I think we may all need a dash of cold water to realize what we are up against: how badly America (and Iraq) has been hijacked.
Let me get this straight, Rumsfeld thinks the newspapers don't report murders and traffic deaths.
Murder is a problem.
Military violence, state-sponsored mass murder, is a problem posing as an attempt to fix a problem.
Billions spent on making problems worse in the name of making them better is a very worthy subject, as you say, for institutional public attention (i.e. media.)
It is also not a fallacy to say the media don't cover murders; it is a fallacy on stilts. Hence the saying "if it bleeds it leads."
Try watching local TV news during sweeps.
The demise of the UIA coalition has been predicted since before it first formed. My prediction is that they are going to do very well in this election, enjoying the benefits of incumbency and the civil war. With all the killings of innocent Shia' going on, the secret jail where Sunni suspects were held and tortured is actually a big plus for the UIA. That's exactly what their constituency wants to see, a get tough policy. In general the Shia' are going to vote en masse for the parties with strong militias, as that is who is protecting them. They are not about to trust secular parties who might disempower these very same militias.
Ibrahim Ja'afari however, is another story. I would expect to see a new prime minister this time around,perhaps even Abdal Aziz Hakim. Whoever it is, he is going to at least give the appearance of being tougher than his predecessor.
Allawi, however, is finished. If the "shoe incident" was planned, it was a political master stroke. If it was not, he is doubly finished. As he could not respond by rounding up and shooting his tormenters, his weakness in Iraqi eyes is proven. He might as well head back to London and lick his wounds.
We don't much talk about murders in London either, but when terrorists hit the tubes, it's news all around the world.
The problem I have with Dr. Cole's analysis is that it "kind of" presumes that Rummy would ever tell the patent and unvarnished truth about something . . . anything.
If you listen to him, and if you listen to Bush, and if you listen to anyone in their administration, you start with the assumption that you are hearing lies, not the one which says you might get good information from them. We have not heard the truth from any of them since 1999 at least.
Cole could save words and bandwidth by merely saying "Rumsfeld=lies" and letting it go at that.
According to Rumsfeld's rationale, the 3,000 or so people killed on 9/11 is "pfffft - don't bother me." Come to think of it, that's the way it's turned out to be. Never mind. Trying to find logic in Rumsfeld makes the erroneous assumption that he uses some.
It is far more simpler to undo Rumsfeld's poor logic...
If tomorrow somewhere in America, a bus was blown up and 43 people were killed, and 70 people were injured... would that be major news for at least awhile in the US?
The answer is obviously yes, and there would be much hysteria and lousy newscasting on it, as well. Therefore Rumsfeld's logic is flawed, a bus blowing up is a newsworthy event. This is further sadden by the fact that we actually are caring less (or numb) in America to such situations, you might say it is surprising the press even mentions it anymore. We would be more shocked if it happened in Canada or Mexico, or most 1st world countries.
Whenever a president does poorly domestically, they run to foreign policy... here we got the reverse, Rumsfeld is trying to direct our eyes to domestic problems.
My goodness this is a world leader?
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