Military Force and the Fallacy of the Middle Way
▻http://nationalinterest.org/blog/paul-pillar/military-force-the-fallacy-the-middle-way-18191
There is a time-honored technique, familiar to veterans of policymaking in the U.S. Government, for ostensibly giving the boss a choice of options but in effect pre-cooking the decision. That is to present three options, which can be aligned along a continuum of cost or risk or whatever, and to list as the middle option the one that the option-preparers want to have chosen. Often this option is indeed chosen; as presented, it appears to be the most balanced and reasonable one, avoiding excesses of the alternatives on either side.
But the appearance is an artifact of how the issue and the choices are framed. The whole framework may be skewed. The offered alternative on one side may be inherently more extreme than the one on the other side. If a more complete list of options were presented, the additional alternatives may be mostly on one side, and the pre-cooked “middle” option would be revealed to be not in a moderate middle after all.