Highlight the white highlighted writing to see what it says, i copied and pasted a quote and this site hates when you do that -_-
The Iraq war is a very disputed war. George Bush stated that
the war was “to disarm
Iraq of weapons of mass destruction, to end Saddam Hussein's support for
terrorism, and to free the Iraqi people.” He also said that Iraq’s WMDs
threatened world peace. In 2005, the CIA released a report saying that there
were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Many people point out that there
was no evidence of there being any WMDs in Iraq. Therefore Iraq did not pose as
a threat to world peace. Now onto the subject of Iraqi ties to terrorists.
While George Bush and his administration were saying that Saddam Hussein
supported terrorism, US inelegance analysts strongly disputed this. The CIA
even said that Iraq had no ties to leaders of al-Qaeda. Now for freeing the
people of Iraq, that was true and is just. Saddam Hussein killed hundreds of
Shi’ites, put down many attempts to overthrow the government (which was run
Sunnis, a minority group), invaded and looted Kuwait, and also had a genocidal
campaign against the Kurds and other groups of peoples. There is no denying
that he was a very brutal dictator and that removing him from power was needed
because he was violating the dignity of humans.
Now, is this war just? Saddam
Hussein was not harming other nations, but was harming his own nation. He was
murdering people of his country because they were of a different sect. He
wanted to wipe out all of the Kurds. This is a just reason to start a war, to
end this dictator’s cruel reign over the country of Iraq. But many believe that
we invaded their country because they hold one of the world’s largest supplies
of oil, and we wanted some of it. This would be an unjust reason for going to
war. Bush told Saddam to surrender or we would invade, and Bush also told the
UN to try to find a diplomatic solution but they couldn’t find one in the time
given, which was one day.
We knew we could easily take over
Iraq, which we did in 21 days, but didn’t fully understand the Iraqi people. This
is one of the unjust parts of the war. We did not understand the Iraqi people
and therefore when we took over, many began to fight against us or with each
other. Most of this was because people didn’t like the government we set up and
each different sect wanted control of it. Once we overthrew the government, we
thought it was over, but that was just the beginning, now we had to overthrow
the people. This part of the war is unjust because we did not understand the
Iraqi people, and therefore did not realize that overthrowing the government
would lead to much more fighting for power.
Saddam Hussein has been estimated to
have caused the deaths of over 1.4 million people, many of whom were civilians.
The death toll of the Iraq war is roughly more than 150,000, with 80% of that
being civilian deaths. Of those civilian deaths, only around 12% were caused by
US forces, which is around 14,400 civilian deaths. While the total number of
“enemy” deaths is around 24,000. These numbers are just very disputed estimates.
Was the Iraq war just? I would say
it is too hard to say. Saddam Hussein killed over 1 million civilians while the
war only caused around 120,000 civilian deaths. These numbers look good but
then you have to look at the fact that only around 24,000 “enemies” were
killed. Most of the civilian deaths were caused by insurgents or fighting
within the sects of Iraq. We did not fully understand the Iraqi people and
greatly misjudged how the war would turn out. Bush also did not give enough
time to find a peaceful way to overthrow Saddam’s dictatorship and greatly
exaggerated the amount WMDs, because there were none. Many people also believe that the war was mostly started because
we wanted to get oil that Iraq had.
After reviewing all
of this I would say that this war was unjust. We rushed into the war without
sufficient knowledge of the people we were freeing or of the threats of the
current regime. I believe that if we had taken time to better analyze facts and
get better information on the country then we would have been able to overthrow
Saddam’s dictatorship without having all the fighting that came afterwards. I
do not believe that we should never have had the Iraq war, I believe that it
would have been more just to do it another way.
