Assignment: Policy Analysis Mini Question

Question 1

Develop a policy argument or claim that is definitive, designative, evaluative, and advocative, using one of these terms: (a) crime, (b) pollution, (c) terrorism, (d) quality of life, (e) global warming, (f) fiscal crisis, (g) human rights, and (h) unemployment.

Convert the argument in the first discussion into a policy debate by providing an objection and a rebuttal. Explain if and why the qualifier changed after introducing an objection and rebuttal. If the qualifier did not change, explain why it did not change.

Question 2

From the case study, Case 8.1, use the argument mapping procedures presented in the chapter and provide two pros and two cons (or strengths and weaknesses) of the recommendation that the United States should NOT intervene in the Balkans.

From the e-Activity, discuss two different modes of argument and examples of formal and informal fallacies. Provide the source(s) of the modes of arguments and fallacies you identified.

Have more to fear from "ethnic cleansing" than any people on Earth. Nothing would reassure them better than a new, post-Cold War Western policy of massive, early response against the persecution of national minorities, including the Russian minorities found in every post-Soviet republic. The Russian right may favor the Serbs, but Russian self-interest lies elsewhere.

CASE 8.1 PROS AND CONS OF BALKAN INTERVENTION58 "Must the agony of Bosnia-Herzegovina be regarded, with whatever regrets, as somebody else's trouble? We don't think so, but the arguments on behalf of that view deserve an answer. Among them are the following:

- The Balkan conflict is a civil war and unlikely to spread beyond the borders of the former Yugoslavia. Wrong. Belgrade has missiles trained on Vienna. Tito's Yugoslavia claimed, by way of Macedonia, that northern Greece as far south as Thessaloniki belonged under its sovereignty. Those claims may return. "Civil" war pitting non-Slavic Albanians against Serbs could spread to Albania, Turkey, Bulgaria, and Greece.

- The United States has no strategic interest in the Balkans. Wrong. No peace, no peace dividend. Unless the West can impose the view that ethnic puriy can no longer be the basis for national sovereignty, then endless national wars will replace the Cold War. This threat has appeared in genocidal form in Bosnia. If it cannot be contained here, it will erupt elsewhere, and the Clinton administration's domestic agenda will be an early casualty.

- If the West intervenes on behalf of the Bosnians, the Russians will do so on behalf of the Serbs, and the Cold War will be reborn. Wrong. The Russians have more to fear from "ethnic cleansing" than any people on Earth. Nothing would reassure them better than a new, post-Cold War Western policy of massive, early response against the persecution of national minorities, including the Russian minorities found in every post-Soviet republic. The Russian right may favor the Serbs, but Russian self-interest lies elsewhere.

- The Serbs also have their grievances. Wrong. They do, but their way of responding to these grievances, according to the State Department's annual human rights report, issued this past week, "dwarfs anything seen in Europe since Nazi times." Via the Genocide Convention, armed intervention is legal as well as justified.

- The UN peace plan is the only alternative. Wrong. Incredibly, the plan proposes the reorganization of Bosnia-Herzegovina followed by a cease-fire. A better first step would be a UN declaration that any nation or ethnic group proceeding to statehood on the principle of ethnic puriy is an outlaw state and will be treated as such. As now drafted, the UN peace plan, with a map of provinces that not one party to the conflict accepts, is really a plan for continued ‘ethnic cleansing.'"
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