Because it’s probably the
biggest issue of our time, Iraq is a great place to start. I began writing an essay on Iraq, but found it becoming very long, so I'm breaking it up. This post starts at the beginning. In the future, I'll talk about the present situation, and what I think is best for the future.
As a swing voter, you may think I once supported the war, but then changed my mind. However, swing voter doesn’t mean flip-flopper. The fact is that I support the war in Iraq, still.
At the very beginning, in March of 2003, several Americans supported the impending war in Iraq. Not only that, but several Congressmen supported it. All of this support was based on intelligence. The intelligence is widely accepted as wrong now, but at the time it was widely considered to be correct throughout the government and the public. There were a few who thought it didn’t justify the war, but even they didn’t doubt it’s authenticity. I think there are very few people out there who can legitimately say “I told you so”. Most have just switched sides.
Everyone, even the President, now freely admits that there are no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. I, on the other hand, haven’t given up hope. Why? We all know that Hussein has had weapons of mass destruction in the past, and that he has used them against Kurdish people in his own country. UN Resolutions were passed repeatedly to get weapons inspectors inside Iraq to ensure he was destroying these weapons, and Hussein repeatedly kicked them out. If he had no weapons, why kick the inspectors out? If he felt that he shouldn’t be open to inspection as a matter of pride, maybe he also thought he should be open to make WMD as well. Saddam had every opportunity to comply with the UN and the international community, and failed to do so. In my mind, if nothing had been done, the UN would have lost all credibility in matters of international security.
I believe Hussein was hiding something. I think in the months leading up to the war,
while the rest of the world was arguing resolutions and debating on whether or
not it was time to invade Iraq, Hussein was either hiding, moving, or (let’s
hope) destroying the WMD he had. Since
there doesn’t appear to be any evidence of his destroying all of the WMD, I
believe that he either hid them so well that we still have not found them, or
he moved them across the border to Syria. Either way, I think they exist somewhere.
Even
if the WMD argument is eventually proven to be false (that he didn’t have them
in the first place), I think there was more reason to invade. Not that the US should be policing the world (that’s the UN’s job), but Hussein did very very
bad things to his own people, including genocide, and those people had no way
of stopping it. History has shown that
sometimes people need the aid of another country, even in the form of military
assistance. Even us. Don’t forget that the French helped the US win independence from Britain.
In short, I think we got into Iraq for the right reasons.
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