Written by: Beck

Christopher Hitchens takes a shot at the whole "Chickenhawk" meme (the one in which you can't express a pro-war foreign policy without personally enlisting in the military, or at the very least, donating your children to the military).

Oh, Jesus, another barrage of emotional tripe about sons. From every quarter, one hears that the willingness to donate a male child is the only test of integrity. It's as if some primitive Spartan or Roman ritual had been reconstituted, though this time without the patriotism or the physical bravery. Worse, it has a gruesome echo of the human sacrifice that underpins Christian fundamentalism.

The whole thing is worth a read, but Hitchens sticks primarily to the whole donate-a-son angle--as though parents somehow had the ability and/or right to obligate their children to pursue a military career.

Jeff Goldstein takes the analysis a step further, ramming a stake into the heart of a canard that, frankly, I'm astonished purportedly rational people continue to espouse. Hopefully he can find it in his heart to forgive me for excerpting three-quarters of his post:

The idea that one need volunteer for military service in order to speak publicly in favor of the war creates any number of crazy analogues (for instance, is it okay to speak out against slavery if you’ve never owned or been a slave?)—not to mention presumes a commitment on the part of those anti-war speakers who invoke the chickenhawk argument to join the insurgency, should they wish to argue against the need for war.

Sadly, the chickenhawk argument, though logically puerile, can prove quite rhetorically effective—in the same sense that charges of homophobia and racism have proven effective in debates over gay marriage and government funded affirmative action programs: such charges, cynically delivered, tend to stifle substantive discourse, forcing one side of the argument onto the defensive by changing the focus of the debate from the issues themselves to the character of certain professors of those issues—and in that regard, they help to sustain the status quo.

The bottom line is, the chickenhawk argument is an impediment to legitimate discourse and debate—and legitimate discourse and debate over national security is a necessity in a free society; and for that reason, those who raise the chickenhawk argument should be treated by everyone—right and left—as intellectual pariahs.

And there you have the two fatal logic flaws with this fallacy: if we grant it's truth, then 1) it's impossible to assert any kind of foreign policy views which include the military in the calculation unless you (or your children) have served in the military, and 2) it's impossible to assert any opinion of any kind regarding any subject in which you yourself have not had a personal involvement.