A cheap trick used by second rate lawyers consists of
juxtaposing two events so as to make them look like a cause and effect, even if
they are not related in any way. The lawyers would employ such a trick – called
innuendo – in a statement of claims or a presentation they make to the court,
thus accuse the defendant of something without having to prove it.
You also see this trick being used by some journalists and
pundits who would have lost an argument because they did not get their facts
straight. What they do after the defeat is reopen the debate, and rely on the
facts that were made by the opponents to reconstruct their old arguments in
such a way as to connect by juxtaposition the facts that were made by the
opponents with their own old conclusions – the ones that made no sense the
first time. And so, even if there is no cause and effect relationship between
the two, the innuendo makes it look like there is one now.
You see an example of this in the article written by Dennis
Prager under the title: “The Immorality of Leaving Iraq
and Afghanistan ”
and the subtitle: “Obama 'ends the war,' but for civilians there it means the
jihadists command the streets.” It was published on January 14, 2014 in
National Review Online. Certain that he will be making a convincing
presentation this time, he begins the article with a strong assertion: “On
every level and from every perspective … the decision by the administration to
withdraw American troops from Iraq
and Afghanistan
is indefensible.”
And so, he describes how bad the situation is in Iraq today
where the war continues among the local factions. What he does not say is that
the war is happening now without the Americans participating in the death toll
or adding to it. But having lost the old argument as to why America must or must not stay there or in Afghanistan
indefinitely, Prager does not repeat that argument here. Instead, he paves the
way for what you might call his new and improved argument.
To that end, he says that while discussing Iraq , a White House spokesman said, “The
president made a commitment to end the war in Iraq . He fulfilled that
commitment,” and Prager takes issue with this kind of talk. He expresses his
concern this way: “That is how Democrats see abandoning countries to mass
death: 'The war ends.'” And so, he accuses his opponents of not giving any
importance to the amount of suffering that is caused by America 's
withdrawing its troops from that country.
He now begins the process of juxtaposition: “This began with
the withdrawal from Vietnam
… After America left, about 2 million South Vietnamese were sent to reeducation
camps...” He goes on to say something which he and people like him never said
before – that the Cambodian Khmer Rouge of Pol Pot were the ones who murdered
their own people, not the Vietnamese. And Prager continues to neglect saying
that it was the world that asked the Vietnamese to intervene in Cambodia . They
did, thus saved the people there from an even worse fate. But once the
Vietnamese ended the military operation, they withdrew from the country, and
let it rebuild itself its own way.
Still, Prager and people like him having previously ascribed
the deaths in Cambodia to the Vietnamese intervention, and were corrected by
opponents such as this website where the straight facts were brought to light,
he now embraces these facts, and juxtaposes them to the old conclusions which
he drew for his old arguments. And like a second rate lawyer, he tries to make
it look like there is a cause and effect relationship between the two so as to
give his old (a now new) conclusions an apparent strength that is false at its
core.
And he bridges the time gap between Vietnam and Iraq this
way: “Having lived through all that, I recall only silence … about the mass
murders that followed the American withdrawal from Vietnam … We are reliving
that now as the Left and its political party abandon Iraq and soon
Afghanistan.”
He goes on with this lament: “The amount of death and human
suffering that will follow means nothing to the Left – so long as there is no
American involvement.” And he could not leave the issue without demagoguing it,
so he warns: “In all previous [cases] only the benighted allies suffered the
consequences. This time, we will too.”