Holy Wars

First, I can’t blame poor “cranky neocon” for being cranky. Events keep stripping the veneer off that movement, and it’s not looking so great underneath. He challenged his blog readers to read an article on wikipedia about Iraq pre-war intelligence and said that anyone with an open mind could see how justified the war was. Hmmm… The article I found by following his instructions said some of the following:

“Although scattered remnants of Iraq's WMD stockpiles from the time of the 1991 Gulf War were found, the ISG's final report concluded that at the time of the invasion Iraq did not possess significant WMD capabilties.”

“Subsequent conclusions fault the intelligence community for failing to adequately explain to policymakers the uncertainties that underlay the NIE's conclusions, and for succumbing to "group think," in which the intelligence community adopted untested (and, in hindsight, unwarranted) assumptions about the extent of Iraq's WMD stockpiles and programs.”

“One area where the Committee found that the intelligence community's reporting accurately reflected the underlying intelligence concerned Iraq's retention of Scud-type ballistic missiles, and its development of new types of short- and medium-range missiles. In the case of the NIE's reporting on Iraq's development of an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV), however, the Committee found that the reporting generally was not well-supported by the underlying intelligence, and overstated what was known concerning the likelihood that the Iraqi UAVs were intended for use as a delivery means for biological weapons.”

“There was no evidence proving Iraqi complicity or assistance in an al Qaeda attack. The report criticized the CIA for its lack of human intelligence resources in Iraq to assess the country's ties with terrorism during the time prior to 2002.”

I’m not too sure what his point was. Maybe he was referring to another article further down the list. If that’s the case, what makes that article better than this one? There’s the rub. Naturally, when we find a publication that supports our views, we want to believe it, but that doesn’t automatically make it credible. Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t. The trick is to figure out what the preponderance of the evidence says.

For goodness sake, even Bush doesn’t pretend this war is about WMD’s or al Qaeda anymore. He knows he looks foolish talking about those things. (Hint: that means that anyone else who cites these reasons looks a little thick himself.) Now, it’s all about liberating the Iraqis from their oppressors and creating a stable democracy. It’s going just swimmingly, too. Every bit as well as it did when the Brits tried to do it early in the 20th century.

On another topic entirely, but one dear to those sweet neocons’ hearts: Intelligent Design is on its way to a science classroom near you. Apparently a few people have figured out that they look silly insisting that they don’t believe in science. Now, they think they’ve come up with a way of saying they don’t believe in science without looking silly. I’m sorry. That’s just not possible. For pity’s sake, people—religion and science are not mutually exclusive. God did not have to create the earth by any supernatural means in order to exist. God can exist even if perfectly natural forces were responsible for pulling off the whole she-bang. Life can have meaning regardless of how it originated. You don’t see scientists running around saying that they don’t believe in spiritual values like compassion and mercy, and if they did, they’d look silly, too.

Silly people!