War in Iraq

Casey Gugliotta

Period 4

War in Iraq

Our nation’s involvement in the Iraq war for political and economic reasons has led to a swirl of events that has added to the overall weakness of the United States. Why did we invade Iraq? Originally, the reason was to “find weapons of mass destruction”, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld told us that not only did Iraq have these weapons but he knew exactly where they were. The United Nations had inspectors in Iraq looking for weapons, but did they find any? Not a single one. Did Saddam have anything to do with the terrorist attacks on September 11th? The propaganda campaign to make people believe that Saddam Hussein was behind the September 11th attacks was so successful that in mid-2003 the believers had grown to 70%. But in September 2003 George W. Bush admitted that there was no evidence linking Saddam to 9/11.

“... about 50 per cent of the population now believes that Iraq was responsible for the attack on the World Trade Centre. This has happened since September 2002. In fact, after the September 11 attack, the figure was about 3 per cent. Government-media propaganda has managed to raise that to about 50 per cent. Now if people genuinely believe that Iraq has carried out major terrorist attacks against the United States and is planning to do so again, well, in that case people will support the war.” —  Noam Chomsky, Iraq is a trial run

Can the United States even say they went to war to eradicate a brutal dictator? No, there are plenty others reeking their havoc on other poor citizens around the globe. Historically, the United States has always been friendly with brutal dictators if it is to our financial advantage. So, what is the true- well only- reason we decided to invade Iraq? Oil is the simplest answer, but there is more to it than that. At first, we went to war with Iraq because an influential group of conservatives convinced President George W. Bush that it was in America's best...