Confronting the Theocracy of Evil

In early November, 2003, I found myself engaged in a series of meetings with members of the British Parliament on the issue of Iraqi WMD.

"I, of course, was against the war," opined Michael Meacher, a Labor MP and former environmental minister who resigned his position in protest of Prime Minister Blair's Iraq policy. "While I view Saddam as a menace, Blair simply had not made a case sufficient to support military action."

Meacher had gained an unlikely ally in fellow Labor MP Andrew Mackinlay, a leading member of the Select Committee of Foreign Affairs who had voted in favor of the war, but had recently come to question that decision. "We need to know the truth about Iraq's WMD," he told me. "We haven't gotten to the bottom of this one yet."

Others were less skeptical. The Chair of the Select Committee on Defense, Bruce George, listened patiently as I took apart Tony Blair's case for Iraq's retention of WMD, piece by piece, in the back of the Member's cafeteria. When I finished, George shrugged his shoulders. "I still believe that this war was justified over the issue of WMD," he said, "if for no other reason than Saddam's ongoing intent to acquire them in the face of UN inspections."

"Intent?" I asked, incredulously. "What intent? No one has made a case that Saddam was attempting to either hold on the hidden WMD, or reacquire new capabilities."

George was taken aback by my words. "Certainly you can't be saying you don't believe Saddam wanted WMD?" he asked.

"What I believe and what I know are two different things," I replied. "Our two nations went to war because our respective leaders said they knew Iraq possessed WMD, that they knew Saddam intended to acquire WMD. It has turned out that there has been no WMD found in Iraq, and no hard evidence to sustain any ongoing acquisition of WMD by Saddam."

"Yes, we know that," George repeated. "But we also know that Saddam intended to get these weapons in defiance of the UN, and for that reason he had to be removed."

"How do you know this?" I asked. "On what basis can you back this up?"

"Because," George said, with a smile, "Saddam is evil."

And with that, the discussion ended.

I had come face to face with a phenomenon I have come to describe as the 'theocracy of evil.' Going beyond mere political ideology, the theocracy of evil encompasses a faith-based value system that embraces a simplistic 'good versus evil' opposition. If Saddam is evil, such thinking holds, then evil must be confronted, and such niceties as fact and fact-based logic no longer apply. As such, WMD became simply an enabling issue – something designed to focus the attention of the public while those in charge pursued the broader agenda of confronting evil.

The 'theocracy of evil' establishes a deeply ingrained mindset that may be the reason why the U.S. intelligence community failed to accurately assess Iraq's WMD capabilities; why Congress failed to adequately debate the issue of Iraq before voting to go to war; and why the American public willingly allowed itself to be drawn into a war without demanding more proof to back up the Bush administration's allegations. If Saddam is evil, such thinking holds, then he surely intends to acquire WMD, and as such every bit of data collected regarding Iraq must be assessed with that assumption foremost in mind.

President George W. Bush repeatedly used the bully pulpit of the presidency to preach the 'theocracy of evil', most notably on Jan. 20, 2003, during his State of the Union address. "Iraq continues to flaunt its hostility toward America and to support terror," the President said. "States like these and their terrorist allies constitute an axis of evil, arming to threaten the peace of the world. By seeking weapons of mass destruction, these regimes pose a grave and growing danger."