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I think that there are many other indications of this sort of thing that are not as bombastic as the Iraq war.
I've done some consulting for a firm that has a grant to evaluate P E P F A R, the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief. Now, some of the religious inspiration for it is quite clear. These include a mandate that 1/3 of prevention spending be on abstinence only education, a ban from using that money on needle exchange, and the so called "anti-prostitution pledge," which basically means that any agency, domestic or foreign, that receives P E P F A R money cannot in any way, even with funds other than those from the US, do any sort of outreach or assistance to prostitutes.
These things are a matter of public record, but what I witnessed as a consultant in this firm went beyond that. Policy evaluation grants usually entail two things, the delivery of a report detailing the specifics they were asked to evaluate, and the "publisheables." That is, secondary publications in academic journals, policy reports, etc. about the program. Often the agency that has the grant has the right to deny any publication that was generated with the grant money. Generally they don't enforce this, as submitting findings for evaluation by the scientific community is a good thing. But in this case, the Bush administration low level staffers in charge of dealing with that company were very strict in terms of what got out of there. The evaluation itself was to be merely about cost effectiveness of treatment, more specifically cost per patient of treatment. No evaluation was to be published on the epidemiology of it, on whether the conditions increased or decreased the prevalence of AIDS, and so on.
Now, of course, many will point out that no one is forced to take that money or to adopt that pledge, and they will be right, but that is beside the point. The point is that, to the tune of 15 billion dollars, the US implemented a plan where AIDS reduction was clearly a secondary goal to moral proselytism.
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