Mother Jones has just put up an amazing timeline of the march to war with Iraq. It runs from August, 1990, up through 2003. It's incredible. You need to check it out here. Now, of course, I don't usually blog about the war. But I'm increasingly convinced that the march to war and the "war on science" have a lot in common. Here's a teaser from the preface to the new paperback:
In other words, widespread concerns about the mistreatment of science cannot be understood except in the context of related worries about the overselling of the Iraq war based on dubious intelligence, or about our government's pathetically inept response to Hurricane Katrina. After all, one key case study of science abuse on the part of top Bush administration officials lies in their repeated promotion of the dubious notion--as a rationale for preemptive war, no less--that Iraq's confiscated aluminum tubes were intended for centrifuges and uranium enrichment rather than for rocketry (a claim that nuclear experts almost uniformly rejected). Does that sound familiar? If so, it's because the administration has shown a similar reliance on scientific outlier perspectives on any number of other issues.
The Mother Jones timeline is brimming with data about how the whole "aluminum tubes" charade was pulled off, among other things. Don't miss it.
