The Terrorist Factory Fallacy

It's a pretty gloomy Monday. The Redskins lost yesterday, the polls are ambiguous at best, a speech by Osama against Bush gets spun so that it helps Kerry, and logical fallacies repeated with mind-numbing frequency at a setting of 11 on the volume knob seem to count for valid argument. Beldar holds the theory that we're "creating terrorists" in about as much esteem as the theory that leaving the meat at room temperature will spontaneously generate maggots:

If what we were doing in Iraq was the forcible conversion of Muslims to Christianity and the extinguishment of their own culture, then yes, we could be "breeding more terrorists," just as if we deliberately salted rotting meat with fly eggs we'd be breeding maggots and flies. But I categorically reject — as racist and bigoted and shortsighted and wrong — the necessary presumption of the "we're making more terrorists" arguers that establishing democracy and freedom equate to that....

And by far the most effective way of minimizing and, ultimately, eliminating (in one way or the other) the sincere-but-confused terrorist converts will be to finish the jobs that we started in those countries when we toppled their governing regimes. Cutting and running will do the opposite — it will not only betray the less gullible and freedom- and liberty-loving Muslims (and others) in those countries, but encourage our enemies into believing that we are weak and easily defeated, and worse, lend credence to the deliberately misleading arguments of our enemies that our real motivations were to promote Christianity or serve the Jews of Israel or steal their oil wealth (or whatever).

Waiter, there's a hippo in this beer...

(Cross-posted by Demosophist to Demosophia and The Jawa Report)