Half of U.S. still believes Iraq had WMD

From the AP via the Houston Chronicle:

A poll by Kull's WorldPublicOpinion.org found that seven in 10 Americans perceive the administration as still saying Iraq had a WMD program. Combine that rhetoric with simplistic headlines about WMD "finds," and people "assume the issue is still in play," Kull said.

"For some it almost becomes independent of reality and becomes very partisan." The WMD believers are heavily Republican, polls show.

Beyond partisanship, however, people may also feel a need to believe in WMD, the analysts say.

"As perception grows of worsening conditions in Iraq, it may be that Americans are just hoping for more of a solid basis for being in Iraq to begin with," said the Harris Poll's David Krane.

Charles Duelfer, the lead U.S. inspector who announced the negative WMD findings two years ago, has watched uncertainly as TV sound bites, bloggers and politicians try to chip away at "the best factual account," his group's densely detailed, 1,000-page final report.

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Beyond the fact that this appears to represent the proverbial "three steps back" on the WMD issue, it is even more disturbing because it is strong evidence that about half the country, and I suspect the actual percentage is much higher, has the ability to casually ignore facts in order to believe what it thinks ought to be the truth. Stephen Colbert has joked many times about "truthiness," but when you get down to it, the widespread existence of these mental gymnastics is frightening, to say the least. Centuries ago, during the Age of Enlightenment, Western Civilization, or at least the Western thinkers who dominated public discourse, came to the consensus that reality is best understood through the use of reason, rather than authority, divine or otherwise. This philosophical approach heralded an unprecedented and miraculously rapid development of both technology and society; the air conditioned democracy in which we now live is only one of the many enormous benefits we now enjoy that can be traced back to the Age of Enlightenment's simple embrace of facts-as-basis for making sense of the universe. That so many Americans have apparently returned to an authoritarian based system of knowledge signals that near total abandonment of Enlightenment principles may not be too far over the horizon. In other words, our grandchildren may be living in something of a new Dark Ages if this trend continues.

It's ironic that the most rabid rhetorical attackers of "Islamofascism" are at the front of this anti-Enlightenment movement: their "philosophy" can ultimately only lead to our society greatly resembling the oppressive theological societies of the Middle East that they so oppose.

No, scratch that. These same people killed irony several years ago.

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