Dept. of false dilemmas

Matthew Yglesias has a good response to this Andrew Sullivan post calling for “hard thinking on the left” in the wake of the Danish cartoon brouhaha:

Andrew Sullivan writes, with regard to the cartoon riots:

People keep talking about avoiding conflict. They are in denial. The conflict is already here. It is outrageous to be informed by a crowd of hundreds of thousands that the West must give up its freedoms in order to avoid violence. I’m relieved to see that this moment has forced some very hard thinking on the left. I got an email from a leftist British reader this week, passionately opposed to the foreign policies of Bush and Blair. Now he writes:

The guy says some stuff, but nevermind. I’m not buying. I’m on the left and this is forcing me into no hard thinking whatsoever.

There’s no need for hard thinking precisely because this isn’t a hard question. Of course newspapers should have the legal right to publish cartoons that offend some people. Of course the people offended by the resulting cartoons shouldn’t start throwing around threats of violence to intimidate people. But what does this have to do with “the foreign policies of Bush and Blair” or the need for “very hard thinking” on the left?

I’m not really “on the left” (well, depending on how you define things, but that’s an issue for another post) but this seems exactly right to me. The argument that one either has to side with the “foreign policies of Bush and Blair” or side with those who would crush free speech is only the latest in a long line of false dilemmas that proponents of the “clash of civilizations” view of the war on terrorism have been feeding us for roughly the last five years.

Yglesias concludes:

The problem with the foreign policies of Bush and Blair, by which I take it we mean the Iraq War, is twofold. One, the nature of the threat from the Iraqi regime was neither so large nor so acute as to make invading and occupying Iraq a reasonable method of enhancing American national security. Two, invading, conquering, occupying, and reconstructing medium-sized multi-ethnic polities ruled by long-entrenched dictators is neither an effective method of spreading liberal democracy nor an effective method of achieving humanitarian goals.

So to recap: Killing people or threatening to kill people over cartoons is wrong. Invading Iraq was a bad idea. That’s what I thought before this cartoon mess broke out, and it’s what I still think today. There’s nothing to rethink.

If anything, this issue might force some people into rethinking on some domestic questions. This could involve questions relating to immigration such as whether effective steps are being taken to help immigrants assimilate in a way such that they come to internalize (or at least respect) values like freedom of speech and the press, and how a society balances those values with a commitment to multiculturalism. But the connection between this issue and support for (or opposition to) the Iraq war is hard to see.