Quick Context Redux

In addition to the links tracking back to my post on my problem on context, this guy redresses the same issue in much clearer terms.

One of the things that I think folks should think about on the pro-/anti-war argumentation is that honestly, even if we had foiled the 9/11 plot, I don't think we should have gone into Iraq, let alone Afghanistan. Take a second to think about that counterfactual.

On 9/10/01 the threat posed by either of those two states would have been roughly similar to the threat posed by those nations on 9/12/01. But yes, Virginia, our view of the world changed. Not in the trivial and obvious body bag sense, but an actual paradigmatic shift.

There was little new intelligence produced during the Bush administration, nor was the policy of regime change in Iraq or the legal framework invented since 2000, but rather a history of conflict at varying levels dating, at a minimum, back to 1991.

The Iraq War generated much louder opposition than the Afghan War, despite the fact that in every legal and historical particular the causus belli for the complete occupation of Afghanistan was fundamentally weaker than it was in Iraq. This fact leads me to think that people who were in opposition to the Iraq War, but not the Afghan War simply have not shifted their world views to the same extent as those who have supported the Iraq War.

Now, the question becomes one of whether or not the shift in world views is valid. And that's a question to tackle for another day.