Fallacies of Relevance

I consider this a rather pathetic piece of writing, but it makes my job easy so I ain't complaining.

September 26, 2007 -- This should be obvious: If America wants Iraqis to respect the rule of law, then no one in Iraq - not even Americans - can be above it.

And that goes double for heavily armed Americans working for private security firms - like the ones apparently responsible for the deaths last week of at least 11 Iraqis in a crowded Baghdad square.

This is a personal attack, or at least an attack on Blackwater, which is being accused of not being careful with its employees.

The firm in question is Blackwater USA, which has about 1,000 employees responsible for protecting State Department diplomats in Iraq - and operates with almost no accountability.
A lot of goons are running around in Iraq on behalf of U.S. diplomats. Failure to rein them in will have dire consequences.

Again, abusive personal attack. "A lot of goons running around," is an insult to all the guards working there. It can also be considered appeal to force...Never mind, it's just warning us of the consequences of not doing as he says.

Iraq's Interior Ministry says that Blackwater guards opened fire on Iraqi civilians after a car failed to stop quickly enough at a roadblock. The massacre produced a furor among Iraqis grown sick of Blackwater's heavy-handed tactics.

This is an appeal to an improper authority. It quotes Iraq's Interior Minister, who is likely to be slightly biased against the Americans, and does not explain the U.S.' version of what happened.

Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki even "banned" the firm from the country (though he was powerless to enforce his ruling).

Exactly what happened still isn't clear. Blackwater says its forces were responding to an insurgent attack, and gunfire from a nearby Iraqi Army installation may have given them that impression.

Now they explain what the Americans thought had happened, so it evens out.

But the massacre remains a travesty - one that the United States needs to address quickly if it wants to preserve the still-fragile progress in law and order that is emerging as a result of the troop surge.

This is the patriotic approach. This one is more for Iraqis, though, telling them to take care of the problem or their country will get hurt.

The core problem is that private contractors like Blackwater enjoy complete immunity from Iraq's laws, thanks to rules enacted under the post-invasion Coalition Provisional Authority. And they don't seem to have much to fear from America's judicial system, either.

This is an abusive personal attack, telling us that the U.S. officers working in Iraq and the U.S. judicial system is no good and is causing trouble in Irag.

Without question, some private contractors perform invaluable work in Iraq, especially as they free real troops to go after insurgents and pacify neighborhoods.

This is also personal, although it's praise more than attack.

Even a spokesman for Iraq's security forces admitted that removing Blackwater immediately, as Maliki demanded, would create a "security imbalance."

This is the snob approach, saying that an important Iraqi person is saying this, therefore it must be true.

But if the firm - and others like it - are going to remain in that country, our government needs to act now to get them under control.

This could be using the bandwagon approach, except it's saying, "Everyone's doing it...But everyone's wrong."

The dangers of Blackwater's continued lack of accountability should be clear:
* It leads the swollen-headed among the contractors to think they can do whatever they please - opening the door to possible atrocities.
* It feeds the perception of Americans as arrogant occupiers.
* It fosters an atmosphere of recklessness - at the exact moment when U.S. troops seem to be winning Iraqi trust.

Indeed, it's no stretch to say that Blackwater's callousness directly undermines America's mission, where it is most vulnerable.

This is both an abusive personal attack, saying that Blackwater is callous, and a patriotic approach, saying that they're undermining America's plan and we should stop them from doing that.

Thanks to deep historical divisions and Washington's obviously insufficient post-invasion military and political plans, Iraq has devolved into countless factions. The best-intentioned of these are loosely connected by a weak central government - but even they often retain their own private militias.

Once again, abusive personal attack, saying that Washington's military is "insufficient," and that Iraq has a weak government.

Less than a year after Gen. David Petraeus took over U.S. military leadership in Iraq, U.S. troops have only started to turn those militias into a somewhat-unified, cooperative Iraqi army, as the surge brings security to more and more areas.

But how can imams and tribal and party leaders - and their gunmen - trust Petraeus, when, for all they can see, the U.S. government is employing irresponsible "militias" of its own, in the form of private contractors?

Put simply, Washington needs to act soon to gain control of Blackwater and other loose-cannon contractors.

If it fails, it risks all the gains it's made in Iraq so far.

The conclusion is alright, there isn't much to complain about.