Was The War With Iraq Just

Only the Future Will Tell

There was an end to "major combat" in Iraq - translation, it is no longer a "war". Saddam has been found and still denies there have been active WMD sites in Iraq. His sons were killed. His regime is over and the people are free from his tyranny. Mission accomplished?

What was the mission again? Oh yeah, to find the weapons of mass destruction as Saddam would not allow inspectors to find them. Saddam is out of the way and inspectors as well as soldiers have combed the country and guess what - these weapons have not been found. Officially, this doesn't mean they never existed, only they have not been found yet and have probably been dismantled and scattered.

What about freeing the Iraqi people? Wasn't that our goal? Not really, but it sounded like a good thing to throw out there to gain some sympathy from the world. The people are free from Saddam, but have a new set of problems to deal in the aftermath ranging from attacks by Saddam supporters to the general rebuilding of the country and setting up a stable government to get rid of the American troops in their land. They will eventually be better once they elect their own officials and achieve stability.

People are still dying. Over 150,000 Iraqi citizens have been killed in this "conflict". Innocent people. Roughly, for every soldier killed in fighting for the freedom of the Iraqi people, ten innocent Iraqi citizens are killed. More killed in a shorter period of time than during Saddam's reign. There is still oppression.

If the troops were to leave, the US would get heat for leaving it alone as it could become another Afghanistan situation. We could be there for over the next two decades, even if just as a supportive role, to assure stability if the rebels, Saddam supporters and other various terrorist splinters try to slow down the progress. We could be out of there faster with the help of the rest of the world giving physical and financial support to rebuild the country and to have the people of Iraq become more empowered in deciding their own fate.

The fate of the Iraqi people truly rests within their own hands. It is time for them to step up to the plate and take control of their country in a responsible way. It is time for them to find leaders who will not oppress them and turn it back into a dictator state. It is time for them to rebuild their homes and lives and businesses. They need time to recover from the pain and loss they have suffered and to move on for their own sake. Their fate should be in their own hands and not what the leader of our country thinks is best for them. Even if they decided they wanted a dictator, that really should be their own choice as they should have a choice to take down their own dictator. They will never really appreciate and accept leaders we choose for them. They need to decide on their own.

Our mission there may not be fully appreciated by a lot of people, but they did take out one serious dictator in the process. If our President could swallow some of that pride and ask instead of "challenge" other countries to help rebuild Iraq, they could be on their feet a lot faster.

No matter how you feel about the war itself, what is more scary is the accusations against Bush. President Bush fed the Americans and the world at large a lot of mis-information to promote the war. Some see it as a means to an end. Others defend he only truthfully told what he believed to be the truth and others lied or misrepresented information to him. Still others claim it was all a spin to fight a war. It is said one of his goals when coming into office was to rid Saddam out of office - and that was before 9/11!

There is a petition for an investigation into what the Bush administration knew before 9/11 as there is reason to believe they knew it before it happened. It needs to be looked into, but not in the same manner of a witch hunt they used on Bill Clinton. What President Clinton did pales in comparison to the accusations raised against President Bush.

Bush claimed Saddam was an key figure in the Al Queda network. This has not been proven to be true. If Saddam had anything to do with 9/11, he should have been punished. However, he did not. One of the rally cries of the war was for revenge for 9/11. Why fight them over something they did not do? The fight is only justified if you made it about helping the people of Iraq or as punishment for defying a UN order. If the latter was the case, it should have been a UN-led war and not a US-led war.

Did Bush and his administration know there were plans to blow up a building via plane? Some evidence points that not only did they know this was a possibility, but they were given an approximate time frame for this to happen and have made their own travel plans accordingly. You be the judge:

Our troops went in there under false grounds, but helped people out who needed help in the process. Only time will tell if that was a good thing.