In my opinoin, (and that's just me, a dumb liberal), the military might of the United States can be better used for peaceful purposes, such as stopping the genocide in Sudan. There is no question that Saddam was a bad man, and yes, I'm happy that he's gone. But Bush needs to get his story straight. Iraq was invaded because of WMDs, but there were none. Then Iraq was invaded because Saddam had ties to Al-Qaeda, but he didn't. So Iraq was invaded to liberate the Iraqi people and free them from Saddam’s evil clutches, but the Administration does nothing about an ongoing genocide in which many Sudanese have been slaughtered by government funded militias. So Iraq was invaded because Saddam Hussein may have possibly in the distant future been able to possibly begin programs to research and produce weapons of mass destruction. What? Any country has the possibility to eventually produce WMDs, but Saddam was not actively planning to produce WMDs, unlike Iran and North Korea. And after going through all these reasons he calls John Kerry a flip-flopper. So we now come down to the final reason in answer to the question of “Why was Iraq invaded?” It is (drum roll please) “we are seeking out terrorists where they live and fighting them there, so we don’t have to wait to engage them on our soil.”
1. America already had a front from which to fight terror suspects, in Afghanistan. And with cooperation of and diplomacy with other nearby countries such as Pakistan and Turkey, the military could be able to coordinate efforts to fight terror throughout the region from a “base” in a liberated Afghanistan.
2. The invasion has seemed to cause more terrorism and create more terrorists than it stopped. It is no secret that with Bush’s unilateral actions, Abu Ghraib, casualties caused by American bombing, and war on a Muslim country, that Islamic terrorist organizations have had incredible recruitment recently, causing more terrorist attacks in Iraq and worldwide.
3. Since terrorist attack are difficult to stop without excellent intelligence, basically what Bush’s strategy seems to be doing so far is place American troops and Iraqi security forces in the line of fire. By enraging the Iraqi population, and not being able to prevent these attacks without mass arrests and harsh interrogations, which further enrage the population, basically what this has amounted to is painting a bulls-eye on every Western citizen and member of the Iraqi security forces, and allowing them to be kidnapped or attacked by suicide bombers instead of having the suicide bombers and terrorists plan to attack or blow themselves up on American soil. By recklessly playing with American and Iraqi lives like that, he doesn’t deserve to be President. President Bush’s policies have led to more loss of life than any President since Richard Nixon.
The military might of the United States can be much better used to prevent genocide and human rights abuses around the world, such as Sudan, instead of being bogged down in Iraq, where civilian casualties are as high as 100,000 deaths. Using military force to prevent genocide and abuses of basic human rights through peacekeeping. Lester B. Pearson won a Nobel Peace Prize for that idea. But I'm just a dumb ignorant liberal, with my crazy ideas.
