Asking the right questions

The argument for/against the war goes on. One of its manifestations is the question of the significance of Saddam's capture. True to form, war advocates hail his imprisonment, while detractors maintain that we are "no safer" on its account.

Such a dispute cannot be conducted in a vacuum - of necessity the reasons for war, pro and con, have to be revisited. I would maintain that, in a way, the question of "greater safety" poses the wrong question at the wrong time. After a risky surgery, it wouldn't really be to the point to berate the physician on account of the fact that the patient is in touch-and-go condition in the ICU; sometimes things have to get worse before they can get better.

In response a war opponent could reasonably allow that this is true, granted the necessity of the surgery in the first place; viz., whether the patient's condition was truly precarious enough that a course of treatment, precarious in its own right, was indicated. Thus we come back once again to the factors which were debated as either speaking for, or weighing against, the war. However - and here I touch upon a theme which was germane to my critique of Dawkins - the fact that things (let's grant) aren't "going well" in Iraq at present is entirely consistent with the mission's ultimate success and its original justifiability, as well as the opposites. In other words, no war opponent should be allowed to slide on the claim that the war wasn't justified because we're having a rough time of it at the moment. Such a supposition is question-begging.

Perhaps a dispute of more modest scope, over the significance of Saddam's capture, could be had thus: whether or not we ought to have invaded at all, there's a quasi-"sociological" question as to the import of seizing Saddam: whether it might have any divinable impact on the shape of the struggle in the days ahead. Here, arguably, "we" - meaning, directly, our troops - might enjoy a waxing or waning of safety and security, to the extent that the resistance fighters did/didn't take heart from Saddam being at large. In other words, does this herald the last gasp of resistance, or is it largely irrelevant thereto? An important question but, to repeat, one independent of the legitimacy/illegitimacy of war in the first place.