Why should you come out of the rain?

Josh Marshall writes this pair of paragraphs:
"It's important to note that this theory of the war actually does have a lot to do with stopping terrorism and the generalized instability of region -- but in a way that is almost infinitely more complex than the Saddam-WMD-hand -off-to-al-Qaida idea that the administration pushed in the build-up to the war.

"It's much more complicated, much more complex, and vastly more difficult to achieve. It's not that the main war-hawks didn't believe there were WMD or that rooting them out wouldn't have been a great coup for US national security. But it is almost as if administration war-hawks told the public a vastly simplified, fairy-tale version of the Iraq war's connection to stopping terrorism and justified this benign deception because the story contained a deeper truth, almost in the way we tell children similar stories because their minds aren't advanced enough to grasp or process all the factual details connected to the lessons or messages we're trying to convey. Got all that? Good. "

Well, I must ask: why do we come in out of the rain? Is it because we ought not get wet, or might catch cold? Or is it because lightning can kill you? I think we ought to regard storms as serious things because of the potential of lethal lightning, not the certainty of wet clothes. As Daniel Drezner points out in a review of this article, "States often go to war for a melange of reasons that go beyond self-defense." What we often focus on, however, are the worst case scenarios. The "Saddam-WMD-hand -off-to-al-Qaida" scenario was unlikely but scary, much like getting struck by lightning. The many other reasons Marshal mentions fall more into the certainly of getting wet catagory.

Sometimes we are willing to get wet, but few of us are willing to take the chance, even when remote, of being struck by lightning. It hurts.