This question seems to be popping up in all the media interviews of all the Republican candidates for the Republican Party’s potential nominee for the 2016 Presidential election next year. How these candidates answer this question should have been discussed in their planning sessions but it has obviously not done them any good since it is a question that cannot be answered much as the older version of, “Have you stopped beating your wife yet?” cannot be answered with a yes or no. Since most of these candidates are attorneys their ability to give a proper answer is a surprise.

A loaded question or complex question fallacy is a question which contains a controversial or unjustified assumption (e.g., a presumption of guilt in this case). Aside from being an informal fallacy depending on usage, such questions may be used as a rhetorical tool: the question attempts to limit direct replies to be those that serve the questioner’s agenda. This is not a legitimate question and must therefore be answered very carefully or not at all.

The current version of this type of question, “Was the 2003 Bush Invasion of Iraq a “bad” decision?” which is usually followed by a statement such as, “If you knew then what we know now.” There is no possible logical answer that can make any logical sense to a question like this. The person or candidate for office should state that this is not a valid question at any level and here are three reasons why.

Number one is. Since there is no way to know the outcome of any decision the justification for any decision must be based on the knowledge and experience of the person making the decision. Since, in this case, President Clinton three years before 9/11 advocated taking out Saddam’s WMD’s based on his knowledge of Saddam’s having WMD’s and refusing to get rid of them. Then, in 1998, and continuing until 2003 there was no disagreement in any of the intelligence communities that Saddam had WMD’s, and since he had used WMD’s against the Iranians and the Kurds in his country this was not an unreasonable conclusion.

Number two is. Since time travel is not possible asking a question that requires that is not valid. Since there is no way to give a person in the past knowledge of the future than what is the point of this question?

Number three is. The biggest fallacy to this question which is it “assumes” that the outcome of not doing the 2003 invasion would be better than what happened by doing the invasion. The problem is that there is no way to know what the outcome of not invading would have been. This would require an alternative universe a fiction of science fiction fans. However it is possible to speculate on a probable outcome of not invading; which could be an emboldened al-Qaeda since the initial efforts to capture bin Laden in October 2001failed. So what if bin Laden had got WMD’s from Saddam in say 2005 (some were later found in Iraq and that came to light in 2004 to 2006) and he had gotten some of the Mustard Gas into New York City and released it. There was enough found to kill more people in New York City than were killed in 9/11 and there is no way to prove that this would not have happened.

Giving answers like this by all the candidates would stop this line of questioning.