My overwhelming feeling that this was the case [please read this link] was the cause of my deepest misgivings about the Iraq war.

I don’t like to just call people with whom I disagree “ideologues”, but I don’t know of a more accurate description of our government as it headed toward war in 2002/2003.

I went to a conservative Christian school growing up and was never properly taught Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection — the treatment of evolution was basically that scientists, who are just running from God, have just had to decide that everything just “happened”, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary. No mention was ever made of the theories they’ve created that explain and predict to a phenomenal degree the fossil and genetic evidence; the miniscule fraction of exclusively ideology-driven “scientists” that hold to a non-natural cause of biological diversity (and often a several-thousand-year-old earth) were the only ones for whom an attempt at portrayal was made.

I count it as a personal failing that I never looked much further into it (though I did always feel at least slightly uneasy about this glib indictment of nearly the entirety of the scientific profession) until I was older. In fact, I was only taught the basic fundamentals of the theory for the very first time in that place where many college students “fall from the faith”: college Introduction to Philosophy. It wasn’t the philosophy that got me, though — it was the biology.

Yes, I learned more about modern biology (and how to keep from fooling ourselves) in an introductory philosophy class than in all of my pre-college studies. But I digress.

I said all of that to say this: I learned very well from that, probably better than any lesson I’ve ever learned, to not trust people on topics where they “know” the truth and then look for evidence (implicitly discarding all evidence to the contrary) to confirm what they know. And we were going to go to war with Iraq, no matter what happened. Whether weapons inspectors were barred entrance or let in with open arms; whether the smoking gun was a mushroom cloud over Manhattan or a couple of rockets that exceeded their allowed range by a few miles.

The fact that (as of yet) there have been no threatening weapons of mass destruction found is somewhat inconsequential to me. And I don’t think it was purely oil or Haliburton profits or other nefarious schemes that drove us to war. The sickening feeling that I had through the entire build-up was that there was no single, simple cause, there was just an a priori conviction that it was the “right thing to do”. And it may have even been. (Please understand, I am not endorsing that it was, only admitting that there is a potential argument that, despite the seeming lack of weapons of mass destruction that were a threat to the United States and the possible harm to the national security of the United States and to the Iraqi people, it was the strategically best and/or most morally defensible route of action.)

Nevertheless, even accepting for a moment the argument that it was the right thing to do, I am profoundly uncomfortable with anyone, especially anyone in a leadership position, knowing what’s “right”, damn the evidence, and then trying to make an argument for it.