I received a note from a reader in the context of my exchange with Tom Ricks. He is someone who reads me fairly regularly and said this:

I thought you were being way too hard on the guy before, and was saddened to see you double down on it today.

In my experience, lots of people use that kind of “lesser of evils” locution (“x is wrong, but not-x is even more wrong!”), and pretty much never do they therefore mean “so I condemn x.”  While that may not be the most perspicuous language (though some serious philosophers and theologians would argue otherwise — didn’t Reinhold Niebuhr, e.g.), holding Ricks to that philosophically high of a standard is unfairly tough, especially when he clearly all things considered meant in effect the opposite of what your most prominent excerpt implied.

So nail him on his verbal failure or conceptual gaffe, if you want — but make sure it’s clear that that is a philosophical critique, not a policy criticism. It’s easy for me to see why he would be outraged at that partial quotation, and I’d guess many of your most faithful readers shared my shock when reading his whole quote. (I should have written to you then — seriously considered it, but life is busy, and I’m not even nearly as efficient with my time as God calls me to be….)

The reason I found Ricks’s initial quote quite bothersome has to do with the locution he used. “I think staying in Iraq is immoral,” Ricks said. “Immoral” has a particular meaning: transgressing accepted moral rules, corrupt, unscrupulous, or unethical. The rest of Ricks’s statement, “but I think leaving Iraq is even more immoral,” struck me as relevant only if I were to use Ricks’s quote to argue about his position as it relates to pulling troops out of Iraq today. That actually wasn’t my point. It was that despite the enormous sacrifice this country is making for Iraq and the good that has come of it, Ricks still sees it fit to characterize our presence as “immoral.” That troubled me then, and it troubles me now.

At the same time, I can certainly understand why the way I used the quote would lead one to believe that Ricks favors a withdrawal of our troops from Iraq. He doesn’t, and the way I framed his quote obviously (and understandably) led some people to believe he did. So I owe Ricks and my readers an apology. He, and they, hereby have it.

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