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Volume CXXXII, Number 10 |
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War with Iraq: spitted on the prongs of Morton's Fork
KATHERINE CRANE
COLUMNIST
When Saddam Hussein finally agreed to allow U.N. weapons inspectors complete access to Iraq, it seemed at first as if war might not be inevitable. George W. Bush had demanded Iraq's compliance with the investigation; well, now he had it. But now, with the U.S. gearing up for war even as the inspectors prepare to enter Iraq, the question is no longer whether there is going to be a war, but what justification Bush will give when he starts one.
Bush's confidence that he will get his war and his insistence that Saddam is hiding weapons of mass destruction may seem like sheer self-deluding optimism, but they are actually elements of a very old stratagem known as Morton's Fork. Morton's Fork was invented by one John Morton, Henry VII's crafty Archbishop of Canterbury, as a way for the notoriously stingy king to squeeze yet more money from the nobles. The strategy was to take two opposite situations, one of which had to occur, and put a construction on each of them that would lead to the same result. These two situations were the two prongs of the fork, on which the unsuspecting noble would find himself impaled.
As Henry VII used it, Morton's Fork worked like this-if a noble lived in luxury and had clearly spent a lot of money on himself, then he obviously had so much money that he could afford to give a lot of it to the king. If, however, he lived very frugally, and showed no sign of being wealthy, then by not spending money he must have saved up so much that he could certainly afford to give it to the king. And whether he was rich or poor, the unfortunate noble would end up in the exact same way-spitte neatly on the prongs of Morton's Fork.
The flaw in Morton's reasoning, of course, was that he assumed that people must have money, just as Bush assumes that Saddam Hussein must have weapons of mass destruction. But just as Morton made the flaw in his argument its strength, Bush will cling to his belief in Iraqi weapons whatever happens, because it is his ticket to war. There are, after all, two possible outcomes to the inspections. Either the inspectors will find the hidden weapons that Bush insists exist, or they will not.
The Bush Administration has already said, and Congress has seconded, that if the inspectors find secret weapons sites in Iraq, proving that Saddam Hussein has lied to the United Nations, that will be sufficient reason for the U.S. to go to war to disarm him. If, on the other hand, the inspections turn up nothing but what Saddam has already said is there-and that, considering that Saddam agreed to let the inspectors in, is likely-the penalty will be equally severe. Since Iraq must have weapons of mass destruction, a search which fails to find them can only mean that Saddam is still lying to the U.N.. And what better reason can there be to go to war?
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