Was the Iraq War Just or Unjust?

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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.