Though my ideology is liberal, I am trained in the art of argument, and instead of going after an ideology I do not agree with, I try to show how the premises are false or do not make the conclusion necessarily true. In the case of Nick Arhos’ Thursday column, both of those fallacies were committed.

First of all, his points against Kerry are the exact same ones (regurgitated almost word for word) that President Bush verbalized in each debate so far. The “global test” that Kerry said we should pass was not some abstract entity as Bush would have us believe from his smirks and shrugs, but a U.N. resolution. If we are to attack a country the world community has been negotiating with for decades, we must first get the support of that community. That is the purpose of the United Nations – to prevent unilateral action by rogue states.

Secondly, I will refute Arhos’ claim that Saddam Hussein was a “danger to the United States and the world” on the grounds that even our own secretary of defense has admitted the evidence was used to support that claim a year ago is faulty at best. Another point I’d like to bring up is the fact that Kerry’s vote against the $87 billion military funding bill is being so distorted by nearly everyone is based on fallacious reasoning. There is a difference between saying, “I don’t want troops to have weapons and armor,” and, “I disagree with how the president wants to fund these weapons and armor.” Kerry’s vote was based on the latter claim. He has explained this, but there is just not enough time in the debates to show this difference in an intelligible way. Bush wanted middle-class taxes to fund the increase; Kerry wanted the rich to pay for it. The vote was about funding, not protecting our troops.

Once all of that evidence falls, we see that in Iraq, there were no weapons of mass destruction and no clear links between Hussein and al-Qaeda. Though Arhos makes the case of Hussein paying the families of Palestinian bombers, the Saudis have been doing the same thing – and they publicly announced it. Not only that, but Saudi Arabia has been known for years as a country whose human rights are quite horrible. Should I also mention that the bin Laden family and many al-Qaeda operatives have been known to live in and come from Saudi Arabia? So why not attack them? I believe the answer lies in the alliance the United States has with them, one which they did not have with Iraq (at least not since after they fought a U.S.-backed war against Iran during the ’80s). I have treaded off my intended path a bit, but suffice it to say that both Arhos’ and the Bush campaign’s reasoning is flawed, and its evidence is weak at best. Mr. Arhos will have to do better in collecting evidence and structuring arguments to get me to consider his views on John Kerry.

Mike Sturm

Senior, philosophy