Silly Thinking

Derek James has fallen into Orwell's 1984 and he, apparently, can't get out.

Here's a snippet of a recent post;

I'll tell you something, I don't care what Bush's case for war was. Justification enough for me was the U.N.'s case for war. It's often a mistake to boil down complex issues into simpler explanations, but the case for war simply boils down to this:

There was reason to believe that Iraq had illegal WMD, and the international community, via the U.N., repeatedly condemned their non-cooperation and non-compliance. They dragged their feet one time too many.

This is a textbook example of doublethink, and it sort of scared me to see it coming from a fiction writer. That's probably stupid on my part, fiction writers aren't immune from bad thinking.

Okay, to make my point:

The US violated the UN charter when it invaded Iraq. Only the Security Coucil is able to legally use force to settle conflicts except in the case of self-defense. To bring up the Iraqi violation of UN resolutions, resolutions that the US was often enough simultaneously violating, as a justification of an illegal invasion by the US, is to "to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancel each other out,  knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them."

Here's how the logic of this argument works, or doesn't work:

Iraq violated UN resolutions many times. The UN is the highest authority, enforcing standards of moral conduct on the international level. Any country that violates UN resolutions loses it's right to sovereignty and must be brought into line by force. The UN was unwilling to use force in order to bring Iraq into line. The UN is therefore irrelevant. The US has to supersede the UN, violate it's charter, in order to take on the task of enforcing the UN resolutions because the UN is no longer relevant.

Anyhow, those who would try to justify the invasion have now reached truly Orwellian levels of absurdity.

Oh, one more thing:

Down with Big Brother!