On the news tonight there was coverage of protests in Washington against the Iraq war. There was a soundbite of an Iraq veteran saying “You can’t support the troops and oppose the war, because the troops support the war.”
These thoughts flashed through my mind in quick succession:
- Argument.
- Argument, very concisely expressed.
- Bad argument.
- Bad, but interesting.
Why interesting? Well, consider what this fellow must be assuming. Put another way, what co-premise would, if true, make this argument strong?
Presumably something like, “if you support somebody, you have to support what they support”.
This is similar to the technical notion of transitivity: if A supports B and B supports C, then A supports C. Conversely, if A doesn’t support C, then A doesn’t really support B.
So we get:
Now it seems to me that this assumption is obviously wrong as a general principle. For example I can support my child without thereby being obliged to adopt whatever ill-considered attitude they might adopt.
From a “critical thinking” perspective, the argument is really a “fallacy of equivocation” – i.e. an argument that is fallacious because it “equivocates” on a key term, meaning that it uses a key term in different ways in different places.
The term “support” means one thing when you talk about supporting the troops, and another thing when you talk about supporting or opposing the war.
But there is a deeper issue here – the idea that allegiance to a group requires allegiance to the beliefs of that group. Something profound (and presumably of evolutionary origin) in the human psyche makes us tend this way. Many human organisations promote the idea and owe their continued existence to its power. But it is of course a dangerous idea.
Tim van Gelder 
The general transitivity argument fails of course, because the co-premise is much too strong. But the veteran might reject such a general copremise, but still think his argument valid. So what special co-premise might work?
His short argument raises an interesting point about equivocation on the part of his opponents: just what do we mean when we say we “support” the troops? Presumably in his view, just appreciating them as people is too thin.
What would it mean to say “I support Bush, but wish he hadn’t won the election”? It’s a fine declaration of caritas — my opponent is not intrinsically evil and I wish him no harm — but misses the point as far as the issue and action at hand.
The veteran wants support-troops-as-troops, not just support-troops-as-people. You could support troops as troops and oppose the war IF the troops were ambivalent, or objecting. But his other premise is that the troops support the war, presumably as a war.
So the argument would be:
You cannot support the troops (as troops) and oppose the war because { The troops support the war; To support troops (as troops) you must support missions they support }.
When war opponents talk about supporting the troops, presumably what we mean is that we’re not going to villify them Vietnam style. They are doing their job, and they may like it, but we really wish they weren’t and didn’t. We can still “support” them in terms of writing to them, sending them care packages & body armor, and all, on the premise that right or wrong, they’re in a lousy situation which we are collectively responsible for, and need comfort.
But I think the quoted veteran is saying that this isn’t the same as agreeing that they’re doing the right thing, for the right reasons. It’s not what he means by support.