This is probably dead news by now to most people, but it’s still pretty important for a lot of reasons, like voters choosing their nominee for the upcoming election.
So, my roommates and I were just talking about politics, and Iraq came up. Now, I never agreed that we should have invaded Iraq. I believe that our continuing occupation there is not only digging us further in debt, but also costing the lives of innocent Iraqis and American soldiers. So far, it is estimated that 88,000 Iraqis and 3,950 U.S. Armed Forces have been killed in the Iraq War (sources: 1 and 2). Compared to 9/11, which had a death toll of 2,974 fatalities, the Iraq war has killed over 30 times more people.3
Let me preface this by saying that an uncle of mine is in his second tour of Iraq, and my friend’s brother has been there more times than that. I don’t agree with the war but I still support the troops - blah you’ve heard all this a million times before so why should I bother.
Anyway, I had some key disagreements with them, but my biggest issue is that one of my roommates denied that Bush tried linking the attacks of 9/11 and Iraq in order to justify the invasion. There are really two different arguments going on here.
First of all, there’s the notion that Bush was wrong about Iraq (no WMD’s, no real Iraq link to 9/11), and we know that this notion ended up being dead on. Now, most people can agree with this notion, while others simply refuse (”Well, how do we know Saddam wasn’t planning on building WMDs?”). However, most of us can agree that we didn’t go into Iraq for the reasons Bush was telling us. This is fine, but our argument stemmed from the idea that if Bush had stated plain and clear that he wanted to invade Iraq to kill Saddam, “liberate” the people, bring democracy to their front door, and occupy the country to have control over the oil, we should still support that! I don’t agree at all. I think that the only way he could garner support for this invasion was by stirring up the American people by using the “If we don’t attack them, they’ll attack us!” ideology. Don’t get me wrong, I think Saddam was a bad guy and the world is probably better off without him, but are we the ones to trade so many lives to take down one evil man? If our country really only cared about saving the world from evil and bringing democracy to countries in need, why would we randomly pick Iraq out of the bowl? Simple - there were hidden agendas from the start.
The second argument is that Bush didn’t try to make non-existent ties between Iraq with 9/11 to gain support from an angry and emotional American people. That is simply not true. The whole administration played the American public and got 70% of the country to agree that we didn’t care that we couldn’t find bin Laden. On September 11th and 12th, then-Defense Secretary Dondald Rumsfeld suggested that the US should use 9/11 as an excuse to attack Iraq. Then-Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz pushed for a regime change in Iraq, claiming that there is a 10 to 50 percent chance that Iraq was involved in the attacks, and claims that Iraq should be attacked because it is ultimately the source of the terrorist problem.4.
There are just a ton of quotes from Bush that I could quote here, but I think I’d be just mostly preaching to the choir. Also, it’s late and this blog entry is way too long. Everyone knows that Bush lied about what we were going to war for, and I thought that with an overwhelming majority of Americans wanting us to get out of Iraq, people out here would agree with me for the most part. But, I like debating about politics, so I guess I got my fill for the day.