The Logic of a depraved Ideology

How can we make an educated guess as to what the consequences of an act or an ideology might be? There is a way we can try, but the probability is low we'll make the correct guess in any of the cases we tackle. Still, to get there, we may borrow from the logic of science and make the attempt.

Here is the reasoning: Even if we do not live billions of years while the stars take that long to form, to live their lives and to explode into supernovas, we know what happens because we see many of them, each at a different stage of its life cycle. Similarly, if we look at our own history, and we factor into the equation the applicable caveats, we can make an educated guess as to what an act we may execute today or an ideology we may adopt is liable to cause in the future.

Richard Cohen has taken that approach and drew a parallel between what happened in history and what's happening today, and made an educated guess. He wrote: “Aleppo is a symbol of American weakness,” a column that was published on September 26, 2016 in the Washington Post. He sees a likeness between what happened to a town in Spain called Guernica in the year 1937, and what's happening today – in the year 2016 – to a city called Aleppo in Syria. He tells how the two places were bombed, and concludes his presentation by predicting that “worse will follow” for Aleppo.

Richard Cohen cannot be faulted for reaching that conclusion. However, he goes further than that and speculates as to what could have been done to stop the carnage in Aleppo but was not. He says this: “Obama takes pride in being the anti-George W. Bush. He did not get us into any nonsensical wars of the Iraq variety. The consequences for Syria have been dire.” Aside from the unconvincing view as to why Obama did not act, Cohen has failed to factor a huge chunk of data into his hypothesis. We can talk about that in the abstract or we can take advantage of another article published on the same day to illustrate the point. We choose the second.

On September 26, 2016, a doctoral student named Spencer Case published an article in National Review Online under the title: “Unthinking the Thinkable” and the subtitle: “Iran and the bomb.” The writer begins the presentation with this assertion: “Wishful thinking won't prevent the ayatollahs from bombing Israel.” He goes on to make the point that it is near absolute certainty Iran will launch a nuclear attack on Israel.

In a manner that is eerily similar to that, it is now entrenched in the history of Bush's Iraq war that the most consequential piece of evidence to convince the Western intelligence services that Saddam Hussein had Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD), was a thesis written by a doctoral student speculating about such a possibility. The paper was presented to those intelligence services not as a student thesis but a secret report.

That fictitious report was said to be so secret in fact, its origin could not be divulged. However, everyone was deliberately given the impression that it was the work of the “infallible” Israeli intelligence service. But as it turned out, the report was not theirs. On the other hand, the deception regarding the authorship of the paper that convinced W. Bush to commit a most horrific crime against humanity was their doing. It was a Jewish deception of the first order.

As the events unfolded over the years, the evil act committed by W. Bush began to spill into Syria, creating the horror that's there now, including Aleppo. Despite the clarity as to who is responsible for that history, we have Richard Cohen saying that Obama is the one. He is, says Cohen, because he did not do more of what caused the horror in the first place. We also have Spencer Case writing the kind of thesis/report that is meant to repeat in Iran what the fictitious report has accomplished over the past 13 years in the Levant.

Is it logical to infer or conclude that Obama or the next President will again be so deceived as to repeat the Bush horror? Cohen insinuates that deception or not, she (or he) should get involved in Syria. But that's only because Cohen did not take into account the data that came to light during the discussion on the Spencer Case article. It means that, absent a caveat, his guess cannot be said to have risen to the educated level.

Had Cohen factored that data into his presentation, he would have seen that behind any attempt to involve America in another military adventure in the Middle East is an ideology that's based on a most depraved logic. In fact, sheer depravity is what the Spencer Case article is all about.