Did the surge succeed? Or was there just a lot of ethnic cleansing in Iraq?
11 comments July 29th, 2008
Juan Cole SUGGESTS that people who deem the surge in Iraq to have been successful might have fallen for a logical fallacy known as post hoc ergo propter hoc: If event X comes after event Y, it is natural to suspect that Y caused X.
It’s like saying that once the baseball season starts, drownings increase. Therefore, baseball causes drownings.