News reports indicate the assault on Fallujah is moving forward. Marines supported by the elements of the 1st Infantry Division, the 1st Calvary Division, and Iraqi Army units have attacked from the Northwest and Northeast, into the respective neighborhoods of Jolan and Askari. At the start of the offensive, Coalition forces attacked from the West, taking the two bridges that span the Eastern segment of the Euphrates River. While the media is not reporting this, it is likely Fallujah’s industrial park district is either under Coalition control or will be assaulted shortly; the same goes with the region West of both Askari and the industrial park.
Power has been cut off in the city, and all roads have been closed. The only people permitted to exit the city are women, children and boys under 15 and men over 50 years of age. The task force is using the full compliment of tools at its disposal: tanks, Bradley infantry vehicles, artillery, airstrikes, JDAMs, UAVs, robots, and the most effective tool in the U.S. military, the Infantryman and Marine trained in urban warfare (Military Operations on Urbanized Warfare – MOUT). The U.S. military seems to have perfected urban warfare and took historically low casualties in Fallujah last spring and in Najaf last summer. But the insurgents in Fallujah have had seven months to prepare the battlefield. Expect heavily fortified bunkers, roads littered with IEDs and buildings extensively booby-trapped.
A look at the map below indicates that the city is effectively surrounded (blue boxes indicate suspected Coalition troop positions, keep in mind my assumptions on the Coalition forces both West and Southwest of the city). The neighborhood believed to be the stronghold of the insurgents is Jolan. Expect a box to form around this neighborhood as the Coalition forces segment and destroy all opposition in their area of operations; everything moving in this box will be fair game. The Marines and infantrymen will take buildings that will give then tactical superiority, then proceed to segment the Jolan neighborhood and clear the areas block by block, leveling any buildings deemed a threat to Coalition forces and clearing lanes of fire if needed. The railroad embankment to the North of Fallujah, the highway to the East (not pictured) and the Euphrates River to the West are effective man-made and natural boundaries that will help prevent the escape of insurgents fleeing the battlefield.
Best wishes to the American, Iraqi and British troops fighting in Fallujah. Success in Fallujah is not in doubt, but Zarqawi and his cohorts are dangerous adversaries intent on killing as many Coalition soldiers as possible. There is no more dangerous terrain to fight on than an urban environment. Step lightly, keep your eyes open, move fast and strike hard. The men and women fighting in Iraq are willing to sacrifice everything for our safety, and are in our thoughts and prayers.
(Note: the map used in this post has been copied from Global Security; the main roads are highlighted in green. I have modified this map to include Route 10, the Railroad, suspected Coalition positions and other features.)
Click on the map for a larger image.
14 Comments
Sorry to change the subject from the war, but a couple of days ago, Socialism_is_Error wrote “please cite me some favorite examples of Ann Coulter’s illogic; I should like to examine this.”
It took me a little while to get around to it, and it led to some clarifying thoughts. I will provide the first paragraph of her book, “Treason”
Labels just diminish everything. There are “conservatives” out there who hate our country for our tolerance, just as there are “liberals” out there who hate it for lack of the same. It’s not honest questioning in search of the truth that is un-American. It’s not well thought out alternatives, and reasoned, informed arguments that are un-American. What’s un-American is the assumption that parties are guilty until proven innocent. What’s un-American is the assumption that all of our motivations are evil. What’s un-American is dividing our country into “classes” and intimating that a person who makes $200k a year is not in the “working class”, and forwarding the assumption that “the rich” must have exploited someone to get that way. What’s un-American are the people who criticize the “unwashed masses” for their bad choices, and failure to see the world through rose colored glasses from an ivory tower.
Beard:
Thanks for the response, but I’m afraid this citation is not very useful for our purpose. The book’s opening paragraph is a dramatic device, designed to draw the reader into the substance. No chain of logic is necessary, since it is simply a series of assertions that the reader would expect will be fleshed out and supported in the succeeding text.
It is like Michael Moore’s recent feature of the “Jesusland” cartoon map on his site, or Slate’s series title “Why America Hates Democrats – A Dialogue”; these things are only meant to prompt deeper investigation, not to serve as statements of truth.
As to your example of illogic, I am sufficiently familiar with logic to follow the syllogism and I concur with your parenthetical commentary. The difficulty with this is that you are dealing with an argument constructed by yourself, rather than one asserted by Coulter or me.
May I suggest that at the risk of your sanity you read a little further? On the third page of the copy I hold, there is a short discussion of an interchange between the 1988 presidential campaigns that we might be able to examine for logical soundness. It will take some work, but I note that it includes a reference to the “Criticism = hatred” idea you used in your post and thus might be acceptable to you.
SIE writes: “May I suggest that at the risk of your sanity you read a little further? On the third page of the copy I hold, there is a short discussion of an interchange between the 1988 presidential campaigns that we might be able to examine for logical soundness.”
OK, I’m tough. But if I’m going to do this, you’ve gotta pay close attention, because we’re going through that paragraph, sentence by sentence. Here we go …
Bush points out that Dukakis had vetoed a bill that would have required students to recite the Pledge of Allegiance in schools every day. [I’m not going to argue the merits of the substance here. We’re discussing AC’s command of logic. But remember, the issue is whether to *require* schoolchildren to recite PoA.]
We don’t hear how Bush framed his observation, but it was surely to make Dukakis look unpatriotic, and Dukakis objected. In normal discourse, one is better of letting such things slide, but you have to hit back, every time, in a political campaign, or you get stomped. Clinton knew this; Dukakis didn’t always remember. However, this time, we get a quote from Dukakis citing McCarthyism. He says “The American people can smell the garbage.” No class divisions here; just political back and forth.
Then AC asserts an intended class distinction between sophisticated Americans and others, presumably Republicans. She gives extensive quotes from “one journalist” who says divisive things. [See my previous discussion of the “Every village has its idiot” principle.] There’s a footnote that possible gives the name of the journalist, but Amazon doesn’t let me read it. AC then goes on to assert that the intention is to restrict the free speech of Republicans.
In the course of doing this, AC exaggerates the original charge saying that Dukakis “vetoed the Pledge of Allegiance”, as if that were even possible. What he vetoed was a bill requiring schoolchildren to recite the Pledge, not the Pledge itself. Anyone can say the Pledge, and I’m sure Dukakis himself is very happy to. But there are real policy disagreements about what it is legitimate to require of the entire population of kids in public schools.
And don’t think that this semantic slide from vetoing the requirement to “vetoed the Pledge of Allegiance” is accidental. AC is a very sophisticated writer, and she knew precisely what she was doing by writing that.
Her next sentence, “Free speech is a one-way ratchet for traitors”, is a puzzle in the sense that it is a bit hard to understand what it could mean, if interpreted literally. But its emotional force is clear: “My opponents are traitors, and they want free speech for themselves but not for us.” Without ever giving an example of how free speech was denied to them. They were criticized for what they said, yes, but were they denied the freedom to say it? No.
The final sentence creates a false linguistic parallel between the two cases. She uses the phrase “those who support patriotic oaths” (which likely includes most of her audience), when the journalists’ criticism was actually directed at a somewhat different group: “those who support requiring schoolchildren to recite patriotic oaths”. Lots of perfectly patriotic people get queasy about forcing other people to act patriotic whether they feel like it or not.
AC is an excellent writer. She knows how to ring the reader’s emotional bells. She understands the “Every village has its idiot” principle, and exploits it frequently, to outrage the reader. There is very little logic here, and most of that is false. (Of the form, “one liberal said X, so all liberals must believe X.”) Most of what she’s saying isn’t logic at all, but juxtaposing concepts in ways that inflame the emotions.
I rest my case.
Beard:
Is this what is called ‘deconstruction’? I’ve never been exposed to instruction in the technique, but the word seems to lend itself naturally.
At any rate, I don’t think we’ve made much progress toward the original goal. Although you state that you don’t intend “to argue the merits of the substance here”, there seems to be quite a bit of that.
I think you are forgetting that to indict AC’s (or anyone’s) logic, what is required is to show that the operation of logic upon the stated premises does not necessarily yield the stated conclusion, irrespective of the underlying truth or falsehood of the premises or conclusion.
As I see it, AC is making two examples here of the same syllogism, as follows:
Premise 1: Bush’s allegations are McCarthyisms.
Premise 2: McCarthyisms are illegitimate, i.e., not worthy of answer.
Conclusion: Bush’s allegations are illegitimate, i.e., not worthy of answer.
This fits in with her general theme that the liberals shout McCarthyism rather than engage in debate.
Although the cited journalist does not use the McCarthyism reference, the sense of illegitimacy is the same, in that the accusation is along the lines of ‘deceiving the ignorant masses’.
In either case, the soundness of the logic itself is ,I believe, manifest. Note that Premise 2 is developed from the dictionary reference I found via Yahoo!.
You’re quite bright in my estimation and I can see that we could have a lot of enjoyment batting around any number of issues, but the original question here remains unresolved. Your innings, if you wish, or we can branch off to other things.
SIE:
Thanks for your nice reply. I’m enjoying this, and I’m happy to continue it for a while in this comments area (“The Box”). Since it’s no longer current, we’ll pretty much have it to ourselves, I suspect. Not that I mind other participants.
I think you are completely correct that that syllogism is sound. The Conclusion follows logically from the two Premises. It seems to me that Premise 1 is true, Premise 2 is true, and the Conclusion is true.
But notice, this isn’t Coulter’s argument. It is *Dukakis* whose argument is summarized by this logically sound inference.
I think that AC is arguing that Bush’s claim is *not* an example of McCarthyism. However, I can’t be sure of this, partly because I haven’t read the rest of the book, and partly because, according to rumor, she spends a fair amount of the book defending McCarthyism (!). That is, claiming that Premise 2 is false. If true, this is really bizarre.
So, having confirmed that Dukakis’ logic is sound, let’s return to Coulter’s logic.
What I tried to say in my previous message is that she doesn’t even have a coherent argument. It is difficult to identify one statement that follows from another, or that can be justified on the basis of evidence provided or even referred to. There are a number of places where she quotes someone, like Dukakis, who says something perfectly reasonable, then quotes someone else saying something stupid, and then implies without *quite* stating it, that all liberals are traitors, trying to take free speech away from Republicans.
Just try to line up the pieces into something that resembles a logical argument, so you can figure out whether the individual pieces are true or false. I claim it can’t be done. The terms of the discussion are slightly modified from statement to statement so they never do fit together. It’s really quite clever, the way she perverts the use of language, and prevents it from communicating a clear statement that can be evaluated.
It’s much more like poetry (in a poisonous sort of way), whose purpose is to evoke thoughts and ideas and feelings in the reader, not to be evaluated for logical structure and such pedestrian (dare I say conservative) things as truth or falsity.
So, yes, this is deconstruction, of a sort, though I expect that English professors who are professionals at deconstruction would faint at my claim. I really think of it as just reading something carefully. Very carefully. To make sure I understand what is being said, and why. It’s not hard to do. It just requires concentration and taking the text seriously. What is *actually* being said here, and how does it all fit together?
Let’s go another round on this one.
I just noticed that I never addressed your reference to “her general theme that the liberals shout McCarthyism rather than engage in debate.”
It’s hard to address the specifics of the Bush-Dukakis interchange, because AC doesn’t provide even the shortest quote showing how Bush presented the criticism of Dukakis. In the context of that campaign, we can be certain that it wasn’t in the neutral, factual tone that she uses in that particular sentence. (See how clever she is? She is capable of being clear, neutral, and factual, but she uses it only when paraphrasing the argument of someone she likes. When paraphrasing the other side, you would think they had “political Tourette’s syndrome” (my joke).)
I look forward to your comments.
Bill H wrote: “What’s un-American is dividing our country into “classes” and intimating that a person who makes $200k a year is not in the “working class”…”
The IRS makes the distinction between “earned income”, which is salaries and wages, and “unearned income”, which comes from interest, dividend, capital gains, etc. For most of us working stiffs, most of our income is “earned income”, though retirement accounts and the like grow through “unearned income”.
The major impact of the Bush tax cuts is to decrease taxes on unearned income. There are some cuts to earned income tax rates, but the impact of those are smaller. At the same time, the burden of things like social security is assessed as a payroll tax, applied to “earned income”. This is on top of regular income taxes.
It’s not really so much classes of people, as classes of income. Many of us have some of each, but most people rely mostly on “earned income”, and they are getting the shaft. The more money you get as “unearned income”, the more you benefit from the Bush tax cuts.
Seems a shame the Democrats didn’t campaign on that, rather than the way they did it.
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Beard:
I must take my wife away for fun and frolic and I will be out-of-range of the Internet. I promise to return and resume, if you wish; but, for now, I leave you with the following:
You expressed some surprise with
according to rumor, she spends a fair amount of the book defending McCarthyism (!).
Nothing could be further from the truth. I include the definition of the term (link):
NOUN:
1. The practice of publicizing accusations of political disloyalty
or subversion with insufficient regard to evidence.
2. The use of unfair investigatory or accusatory methods in order
to suppress opposition.
Senator McCarthy sought to expose the presence of Soviet agents in the U.S. government, reaching to the highest levels; the Democrats, in power at the time, started a campaign of personal destruction and denial lasting to this day. For over 50 years his name has been the very symbol of “partisan witch-hunt”, “Red-baiting” and many other terms in their political arsenal.
The main thesis of ACs book is that, in fact, Senator McCarthy was dead right; leaving aside corroboration of ex-Soviet agents and contents of Soviet files available since the collapse of the Union, undeniable confirmation of this surfaced in 1995 with the de-classification and release of products of the Venona Project (link), a top-secret Army code-breaking effort aimed at the Soviet cable code. Originally started to examine the possibility of a secret separate peace deal between Stalin and Hitler, it found traffic that revealed a far more serious matter.
Verify it for yourself, if you care to. It reveals the motive behind ACs “intemperate” language.
SIE,
Have a good time with fun and frolic.
So, Ann Coulter is defending McCarthy against charges of McCarthyism? 😉
I did follow your link and I read a fairly long monograph from the NSA on the Venona project (http://www.nsa.gov/publications/publi00039.cfm). Disturbing stuff, although I don’t know how surprising it is. Perhaps I’m just cynical, but I always figured that (a) the USSR almost certainly had as many spies in the USA as they could afford and attract, and (b) some ambitious and unscrupulous people would climb aboard the anti-Communist bandwagon and gain power or escape prosecution by making unfounded accusations that would damage innocent people. How well those two abuses balance out, I have no clue.
The NSA document strikes me as being serious, plausible, and credible. Based on the two paragraphs of Ann Coulter’s writing (one selected by you) that I have examined carefully, her credibility is zero.
The NSA document is quite careful in its explanation of what is known and what is not. Coulter explicitly uses a number of illegitimate rhetorical maneuvers to convey strong impressions that she knows go well beyond the facts.
I’m not prepared to go in detail through more of her writing without a *really* strong reason why. (I do have to make a living.) But here is what I would expect.
The NSA document reveals that person X, accused of being a Communist by McCarthy, really was a Communist. (OK, we’ll accept this as fact.)
It will turn out that X was part of a long list of people accused by McCarthy, none of the rest of whom are mentioned in the NSA report or any other Venona memos. Nonetheless, perhaps without making an explicit claim, AC will reach the conclusion that *everyone* on that list was definitely a Communist. Remember, there are lots of code names that have never been identified.
Then it will turn out that some Democrat or liberal Y defended some or all of the people on the list against McCarthy’s accusations. Possibly including X (about whom his defense is therefore wrong), but quite possibly not. AC will transform this, first into the conclusion that Y is a traitor, and then into the further “deduction” that *all* Democrats, and everyone who criticized McCarthy, was a traitor. And from there, it’s a short step for AC to conclude that all *current* Democrats and liberals are traitors.
So, the kernel of truth will be: McCarthy accused X, who turned out to be guilty, and Y defended X, and was therefore wrong.
From this kernel of truth, we *cannot* conclude either that (a) McCarthy is innocent of McCarthyism, or (b) all liberals are traitors. We can’t even conclude that Y was a traitor.
Someone with sufficient motivation could read AC’s book and the Venona memos in parallel, to see what the real story is. But not me. I enjoy reading history to get clues about the future, not to solve detailed puzzles about the past, so I am not motivated to sort this out in detail.
But in my opinion, Ann Coulter has no credibility. Prior to our discussion, I had heard bad things about her from others (which I took with a grain of salt). I skimmed some of her writing in a bookstore, which supported the bad opinion. But now I’ve studied a fragment of her writing carefully enough to see, for myself and in detail, what she does and how she does it. At this point, I wouldn’t accept her word about *anything* without checking with the original sources.
The larger question about what to do about spies might be an interesting one to discuss, but that will wait for later.
Cheers!
Beard:
I return.
I’ve studied your traffic on this subject a bit; on that basis, I’m not sure we’ll be able to come to a mutually accepted conclusion.
In the first place, I’m not sure we approach the concept of logic in the same way. I am a mathematician and logician by training and logic serves me in my work as a computer application systems analyst. I’m a little uneasy with your inclusion of parenthetical commentary on the truth values associated with your step-wise expositions. As I emphatically indicated previously, the soundness of a logic is not dependent upon the truth or falsehood of the premises or conclusion. To wit, the classical syllogism:
If A–>B is true and B–>C is true, then A–>C is true; but,
If A–>B is false or B–>C is false, then A–>C is false.
Notice that the underlying logical structure provides for both true and false as truth values of the components of the relationship. Notice also that the truth values used in logic are “logical” values; i.e., “true” means “unconditionally true”, while false means “NOT unconditionally true”. This makes this parenthetical assignment of “objective” rather than “logical” truth values potentially misleading. A trivial example:
This object is a cherry.(true)
Ripe cherries are red.(true)
This object is red.(true)
I can state that each of these statements is objectively true, but you will instantly recognize that the logic is unsound because the “B” of the first premise is not quite the “B” of the second premise.
Secondly, I have observed that you have failed to follow your own observation that you intend only to argue the logic rather than the merits of the substance. In fact, in a formal examination of the soundness of the logic of an argument, it is required that one accept as true all of the assertions of the argument as stated and proceed to show by the application of logical operators that one or more of the assertions must be contradicted. For example, one may not suppose alternatives to stated assertions on the basis of material not in evidence. The fact that you may know that a objective premise is unfounded or that a subjective premise is at variance with another’s beliefs is not relevant to the evaluation of the proper use of logic (although it is most certainly relevant in the ultimate value of the argument).
An example in your discussion is the use of the concept of “patriotism” as defined by you and/or others (“Lots of perfectly patriotic people get queasy…”). It is not only invalid as an impeachment of the logic of an argument, it is also invalid as an impeachment of the argument itself; one cannot have a valid debate at all without mutually recognized definitions. In general, it is safest to rely on dictionary definitions as a starting point or where clarification is unavailable (as in a published item where one cannot directly access the author).
I will deal more directly with our subject in another post, for volume’s sake; my point here is that we will have to mutually accept these principles (as well as others that may be recognized as we proceed) in order to have a satisfactory experience over the long run.
Welcome back, SIE. Hope you and your wife had a good time.
I’m sure we’ll have to negotiate a bit on ground rules, but I’m confident we can make it work. As it happens, I have mathematical credentials of my own, and I understand completely the distinction you were making between the soundness of a logical argument and the truth of individual premises in that argument. Furthermore, you got me dead to rights with your second point: As the argument about Ann Coulter developed, it became clear that I could not stick with only the logical structure of the argument, so I had to deal with the substance of the argument and the truth of the premises.
To illustrate, consider a modified version of your example:
This object is a cherry.
Cherries are red.
This object is red.
Logically, this argument is sound. And most people would probably, if asked, agree to the truth of the premises and the conclusion. However, on reflection, the universal claim “Cherries are red”, is generally but not universally true. Some cherries are unripe; others are yellow when they are ripe; and there are surely other exceptions.
Ann Coulter uses both these methods and more to make plausible-sounding but invalid arguments: arguments that are logically invalid, and arguments that are logically valid, but with false premises. In some cases, she uses slippery little changes in terminology that look superficially to be equivalences, but aren’t, to lead the reader to an erroneous conclusion. Therefore, I can’t critique her adequately by sticking purely to the logical structure of the arguments. This is particularly true since she isn’t using *formal* logic. She is writing in English, and we both know that logic is only a partial approximation to English argumentation. Logic is moderately good at expressing a number of valid forms of argument, but it can’t come close to expressing the huge numbers of ways to make invalid arguments.
I’ll certainly agree that, between you and me, we need to agree on the definitions of terms. Where one of us thinks we may disagree, we can certainly look up an authoritative definition. However, in critiquing AC, the problem may well turn on *her* use of shifting definitions.
Incidentally, going back to your message, while the first statement of your syllogism is modus ponens, and is correct:
If A–>B is true and B–>C is true, then A–>C is true;
your second one is not correct:
If A–>B is false or B–>C is false, then A–>C is false.
To see this, consider the case where A and C are true, while B is false.
Then A–>B is false, while B–>C and A–>C are both true.
Hi, Beard:
I’m afraid I’m a slave to holiday preparations presently but I will study your submission and answer shortly. I can see that you will supply a veritable banquet for thought and I’m glad we struck up against each other.
Do have a pleasant Thanksgiving.
Happy Thanksgiving to you, too! We’re all sitting around in my brother’s house — three adults with three laptops on the wireless network, and three kids laughing and joking — preparing for a Thanksgiving morning outing before the feast.
Cheers!